1lb Plastic Antweight combat robot with a lifter/grappler weapon type. The compound grab and lift motion is accomplished with a single 230° servo. Haven't heard of combat robotics before? It's basically custom RC cars with saws trying to destroy each other!
So far, I have:
I also decided I want to improve wheel traction (the grippiness of the wheel) to hopefully get more pushing power. I don’t have time to get funding, design, and iterate a cast polyurethane wheel for this tournament, so I decided I will get rubber cement and experiment with gluing rubber bands, electrical tape (sticky side out), and latex balloons to the foam wheels and see what works best.
I brought Ace of Sharks 3.1 to a tournament and it went pretty well! I defiantly found some bugs that need fixed (like the whole weapon assembly falling off) but I was still able to lift other robots and the concept worked great.
There was no four wheel drive for this iteration, but that will come soon as well as wheel guards and a stronger attachment point for the lifter assembly.
I am ready to ship, with the tournament highlight video as the demo video for Ace of Sharks.
Stay tuned to Ace of Sharks as I will continue to improve Ace of Sharks 3.2 to prepare for another tournament before Stardance is over!
Edit for shipwrights because I can’t edit the ship post: I hope bonuses will retroactively apply as well as payout increases. I have a logo I make into stickers to give out a tournaments (a new one for v3 and I have three other Ace of Sharks logos I wish I could show you but I can’t add more pictures to a devlog), I edited a highlight video myself (that’s the demo video) and I designed the poster myself. I worked really hard on making this project do well in voting, so I am disappointed at the fixed 5 stardust an hour payout rate. The fixed payout makes sense with the way Stardance is formatted; it’s just disappointing because of how hard I worked on this project, trying to get 15-20 stardust an hour.
I think most if not all of the time here was spent working on trying to get 4wd to work.
My conclusion is that the regular bolts make too much friction and when the shoulder bolts get here (AFTER the tournament) hopefully the belts will work. Sigh.
The drive works amazing. With previous 2wd versions, driving backwards would not work well at all. This 4wd version fixes that issue, and backwards works just as well as forwards.
I also began redesigning a logo for stickers to hand out at the tournament! I like having one with an image of my robot on it, so I got that one redesigned from v2 Ace of Sharks.
I had to use some regular M3 bolts instead of the shoulder bolts for the wheel axels, but I think it will be good enough for the tournament!
So when I went to order the shoulder bolts off Amazon, shipping takes a couple weeks and they will not get here in time for the tournament. Sigh. I did find a listing on Home Depot for regular bolts that might work (or at least be good enough for now).
Hopefully I can find something that works for the tournament.
I also began making the GitHub repository for Ace of Sharks and wrote a README.
There are a few silly bugs (like putting the screw pass through hole on the part it should screw into and vise versa) but it is assembled and can lift an old chassis iteration! I fixed the bugs in the CAD file and added some more decorations to the top plate. I was surprised at how few bugs there were in the first iteration. I have not tested the 4wd part yet because I don’t have the shoulder bolts yet, but that will come soon.
Before I started the 3D printing the first robot parts, I discovered three four important things I forgot to add in the CAD. 1. I forgot screw holes to attach the top plate to the chassis! 2. I discovered that the gear on the shark arm was intersecting with the top plate. 3. There should be a wall around the gear inside the chassis to keep wires out of it. While writing this, I realized that I need a slot in the wall to have room for the servo wire.
Why?
Since Ace of Sharks is now four wheel drive, it doesn’t matter whether the drive motors are in the front or the back of the robot. According to the RioBotz book, you want the center of mass as far back on the robot as possible. Reversing the position of all the electronics will move the heavy servo to the back of the robot and do just that. Instead of trying to do this and fix all the stuff that will break in the current Fusion design, it was easier to just start over from scratch. Next up: 3D print the parts and see what obvious problems I missed! — Thank you @IvyMycelia for telling be about Markdown!
I made Ace of Sharks a four wheel drive robot! I modified a wheel hub from Printables to have a pulley for a belt on it, but Fusion did not like working with a mesh converted to a solid and I could not finish it. So I had to start over with Fingertech twist hubs (files free on their website) and added the pulley to the twist part of the twist hubs. When I was making the belt, I was doing a bunch of math to get the size and it turned out way too big. Then I realized the number I calculated was the circumference and I was using it as the diameter. That fixed it! Next, I will need to print out the parts and see what problems I missed in the CAD.
I made more room in the back of the robot for pinewood derby car weights (to make the robot drive better on two wheels) then changed the robot to have four wheels (which eliminates the need for the weights). I modified the washer part of a wheel hub on Printables to have a pulley for a belt to drive the front wheels from the back wheels. The file imported into Fusion way bigger than it should have been, which made me do it over twice when I realized. Found an Amazon listing for shoulder bolts which will be axels for the front wheels. I also modified the front attachments to touch the floor with the new wheels.
