Massacre Build 2

I bought some aluminium.

I paid for the cutting on the bars.

I took pictures.

Holy fuck I actually did things? Something is wrong here. But yes, Massacre went from an idea in my headbrain and in CAD to semi Pretend-O-Bot in a day or so. I was happily bumbling away in the shed working on some motor mounts for Shane Swan's beetleweight "RPM" when my Dad knocked on the door struggling under the weight of my lovely aluminium package. Needless to say it was ripped open pretty sharpish!

The 15x50mm bar was unavailable so I ended up with 2" by 5/8", imperial-bot go! Also, instead of 2" square bar I got sent 2" diameter round. Bugger. That has put a slight hold on any gearbox making, I've sent them an email to try and get it sorted. If not I can ghetto up a box from 10mm plate pretty easily.

Well, I've been playing around with it, just getting a feel for how roboty it is. Rough lay out (none of the components are in their correct positions) Can't get over how low the frame is and the really scary part is that it won't be getting much higher. Such is the life for a robot that needs a low weapon. Speaking of which, the blade height looks to be around 70mm or so, hopefully enough to catch a few of the low wedges.           

A bit more pretending/picture spam. Added in the weapon motor and rangle gears and a random bit of steel round to be Shaft Simulator 2014. The frame ends up 30mm narrower than this when actually assembled how its supposed to. Can't really do that just yet as I haven't marked any of it out to carve up on the mill yet. It will be interesting to work on to say the least. Oh and in the last picture there is a piece of carbon fibre to add poshness and professionalism. That's totally how it works right? Battery is a 5s (18.5v) lithium polymer.

Now why did we need to see another pointless render of Massacre? I hear you cry noiselessly. Well its because of the bar. It's happening. Like really. wow. A very kind and extremely helpful roboteer named Mario was good enough to sort out material and cutting of the bar out of  8mm Creusabro 8000 which is a steel similar to Hardox or Bisalloy. I've nicknamed it "Come-at-me-bro" for now. In a week or two I should have 3kg of spinny death, which is always nice. 

Cheers, Haz.

Beetleweight Build

Began the rebuild of my Beetleweight combat robot, Eggbeater. It has changed a lot since last time, namely the 4 wheel drive and proper armour. That CAD picture might seem familiar, I've had a similar one knocking around for ages (that one looked less garish) but I've had to change out the nylon for some blue chopping board. The reasons for this are cheapness and blueness. Valid reasons as I'm sure you'll agree. Now of course I don't expect chopping board to perform anything like nylon, and I shall probably change it out fairly soon (after it explodes in it's first fight most likely)

This was after the first day of building, first I jig-sawed out some chopping board blocks, then cleaned them up on the milling machine. Then I marked out, drilled and bored out the holes where they were needed and the pockets for the motors to sit in. Then I machined the rest of the frame into shape. The curves on the back were fairly simple to do using a jig I had already made up. The curves around the weapon mount were more difficult as I had already bored them out to 26mm to fit the bearings. I hole-sawed out a 26mm plug to sit in the middle of the hole, sanded a few tenths of a millimetre off it and lubed it up. It worked great.                  

     
   
These are some rather wonderful pulleys that my good friend Ellis made up on his lathe. Every time I need round parts I just bully him until he makes something shiny. Here are 5 (4+1 spare) drive/hub pulleys, one slightly shorter one to fit on a brushless motor and a large pulley to fit on the eggbeater weapon.
The drive pulleys are actually pretty clever. The wheels I want to use are Banebots ones, which have a 1/2" hex bore. The adaptors for which are too bloody expensive for me, so I thought I would have a go at making my own hex adaptors onto the body of the pulleys (why they have quite a lot of meat one end) I poked the numbers and grudgingly did some maths and began making chips.

Here is the robot with all the pulley blanks on. Just to test the pulley groves I slung a couple of hair bands on as to be pseudo belts. Well it certainly looks like a thing!

Ok well that went better than expected. The pulleys have now been fully "hexifyed" and have been pressed into the Banebots wheels. I made the hex slightly oversize so the press fit would be pretty fookin tight. You can also see where I added a grubscrew by drilling and tapping a hole in the hex so it fits on the "D" shaft of the motors without slipping.

Here you can see the parts of the robot being put together. I made the belts up from some material kindly given me by the multi AWS winner, Scott. The belt was cut to length, then using a jig clamped in place and melted together to create like a large O ring belt. Works surprisingly well although it needs to be tighter than I thought. I think I can cut another 5-10mm out of the belt length and improve the drive.


That's pretty much it for now. I need to get the armour made when my aluminium arrives and source some thin carbon fibre or .5mm titanium for the base plate. Will update again soon with either more of this, or some Massacre.
Cheers, Haz.

Massacre build part one

That's right, build!

Sorta....

Kinda...

Ok well I haven't started attacking metal yet but by the time this gets read I'll have ordered the material for the frame. I did however do some work on the wheels, and wheels are kind of important for a robot. Taking the rather swish nylon wheels that Ellis made (that I still haven't paid him for, oops) and getting the tread put on them. The wheels are 30mm wide and handily the bike tire in question had a 30mm wide bit of tread with the same pattern (different patten either side of it) so I could make some snazzy looking wheels. We had a bit of a worry weather the screw heads would stick up further than the tread but it turned out to be fine. I only stuck a couple screws in because I'll have to take the tire off to press the nut into the wheels so it can mate with the drill shaft. Pics:

Yep, those are definitely wheels. You may be wondering why exactly I decided to stick the tires on before pressing the inserts into the wheels. My awns er is because A, I didn't have any inserts yet and B because I wanted to have a propperish looking pretendobot.                                                                                      

There you can see Massacre roughly being formed with the wheels of wheelyness and the shaft of chunk (which will be cut down a lot to stop it being so massive and chunky)                                                     

That's all for now, probably more progress next week. Cheers, Haz.

Milling.. sort of

Something actually happened robot wise, several somethings in fact, which is a nice change. Ellis decided to grace my presence with a visit in which we talked a lot of shit and did a small amount of robot poking. We would have done more but some tit decided to leave the tires for the wheels in Essex or some such place. At least its gone from the parts for the wheels being spread across two countries to being spread across one. Yay geography.

The wheels themselves are rather brilliant I must say, lovely finish  and they are all within 0.2mm of size.

Ok so I don't need 8 but I want 8, so there! The spares will be handy with my ability to design robots without armour or wheel guards or speed or manoeuvrability etc.

Well I got Massacre roughly layed out to just check if the CAD had errors that I'd missed. Just drew the base roughly on some chopping board in marker pen; it will be hardox for the real thing but not as thick. Damn this thing is tiny... But at the same time it feels quite big? What is this magic? Ah well too late to monkey around with the design any more. It's a bit too late for that. I'll get the aluminium for the frame ordered early February probably. 

Also,  NEW TOYS. Ahem. Mill happened and gosh darn it it's pretty. Not all bells and whistles but its a very very nice machine and I will love it forever, promise. Took a few days to get set up due to college getting in the way (engineering getting in the way of machining)

Spent a bit of time cleaning and generally poking the machine to check levels of niceness. It runs very smooth and is increadibly quiet. Yet to do anything precise with it yet as I don't have a dial indicator and other related items.

With no real devices to ensure any kind of accuracy I forged on ahead just to make some chips and actually make something. These are just some trial beetle bulkhead for a drum/beater. 4wd with two motors and belt driven wheels. Frame uses slots to hold itself together and has a little pocket because I wanted to see how that would go. 

Yay, its looks like what it is supposed to look like!

This was really very fun to make, I'm enjoying the mill so much and I don't even know what I'm doing. 

The machine blows through nylon and HDPE, although I much prefer working with nylon at this stage. Being slightly harder has its advantages. For reference, the black bit is HDPE and the bluey green is nylon. Commence picspam!

 Cheers, Haz.

Reality happened again

Cost cutting, Yaaay!

Yeah I sort of realised that I had managed to spend about 8-9 months on the design of the robot, leaving me with a worryingly short period in which to actually build the thing. Then I realised that I had even less funds than I thought, due to me not actually having a job atm (can have a job where I build things please, thank you)

The only option was to build Hazard and Brutality at the same time and call it Massacre!

Here you see the first version of the non 6wd design times, basically
exactly the same components as last year's massy. Same drive motors, same ESC and same battery. The weapon system is the new one, because I have the motor already. The gearboxes will be changed from 36:1 to 24:1. This brings the speed up to about 6mph, slow due to the small wheels but with the large weapon at a low height, I don't need massive speed. I know the belt is kind of screwed up... I changed lengths and couldn't be arsed to change it
 it's like it in all the CADs. Yay laziness

The frame is still aluminium, but no longer 7075. Due to expensiveness and companies ignoring my quotes. It has got a lot thicker though, its 15mm 6082. Still keeping the finger joints though. To support the motor shafts even more there will be an additional bearing in the bulkhead as you can see.

Now this was all going very well for the cheap design, even better when I was very kindly sponsored some ESC's by another roboteer. These are Botbitz TZ85 which offer much smoother control than the clunky Electronize and are much smaller. The orange wheels which kind of became a staple in the Massacre designs are Banebots wheels, very grippy, but not all that durable, and fairly costly to boot. With the rather un-wonderful restraints I'm working too, these sadly had to go. Lucky for me I know a guy with a lathe. I mean, he happens to live in another country, but that's easier to deal with than £4 a wheel when I need at least 12!

Anyway he was kind enough to go out and sample the local bike tire collections until he found these ones, which are pretty perfect. Not the massively lumpy off-road tires, but a nice balance. These will be screwed to nylon hubs that will be turned on his lathe. They end up 60mm diameter and 30mm wide, small and with hopefully moderate grip.

And now for something completely different: Beetleweight motor mounts. The appeal of something simple, like a basic wedge (NOT just a plain brick) was too much, so I set about trying to build something. First off I needed a solid way of mounting the 1000rpm ebay motors. A few quick drawings in CAD and I had a plan. Worked out well. If it interests you, there is a video of the making of the mounts. Nothing special, but they work for me.

Picture of the finished mounts here. They are made of 12mm thick nylon. I would like to maybe make an aluminium pair for extra strength. Or maybe even some of the chopping boards I have.





Speaking of chopping boards I realised the other day that if I get the mill, antweight frames become very easy and interesting indeed, and I can do some really cool stuff with them (I give up on competitive antweights) This leads us on to a cluster bot idea I had, Chalk and Cheese. One piece frames made out of the yellow and white chopping boards i have, speed hacked servos and say 160mah lipo cells should have a fun little joke entry that will be pretty solid.



See if something can actually be built soon. Cheers. Haz

Quit changing things

Urgh.
Argh.

An eloquent start I think you will agree but I feel it apt to describe the general feeling I'm getting from the whole Massacre built at the moment.

I do tend to get the "one step forward, two steps back" when I try and build something, but with this I'm don't have the advantage of the step forward, so I'm seemingly making up for that with some extra steps back. I'll quit whining (lies) and get on with listing the changes.

I've decided to actually make parts for my own robot, and not totally waterjet flat-pack jigsaw puzzle it, this isn't due to me taking some stupid high ground, its just so much bloody cheaper this way. I have a sheet of Hardox, around about 3-4mm thick which should do fine. I marked out the base to get a rough idea of how much other stuff, like the wedge and wheel guards I could fit on there. Wow. My robot is fucking tiny. Or the base plate is at least. Should be interesting to work on I guess. Making it larger isn't really an option, unless I want a 16kg feather. Weight is going to be a pain anyway despite the thing being almost able to fit inside my pocket (hyperbole, I don't have pockets that big yet although they would be handy)

Main change, and one that slightly pains me is the change of drive motors. I'm switching from the Magnum 775 to the Banebots P60. Reason being is that the Banebots are actually in stock, and are a bit cheaper. I was having to do an order from the Banebots website anyway for 775 motors and wheels. It makes sense to add another $100 or so in gearboxes while I'm there instead of having to get two very large orders from the US and get fucked over twice by bloody customs. The Banebots are a more commonly used motor as well, so lots of the guys at the comp will have spares and stuff that I could buy/rent/borrow/steal so I have to carry less. 2 spare motors, maybe a spare gearbox if I have any spare polly to throw at it (who am I kidding, I won't) The Baneboobs are a tad smaller than the Magnums used to be, so some kind of horribly ghetto enlargement surgery will end up happening. Or I could just change the mounts? Yeah. Best do that instead of buggering about with an expensive gearbox.  You can see the adapted bulkheads, it has ended up probably stronger, due to the general lack of large square holes. No idea on what the cost would be, none of the cutting places are talking to me. Depressing.

In actual progress news, the updatephobic Elvis is lathing away like a bitch, doing cool little odds and sods and found some time in his "busy" schedule to make some prototype Rangleboxes. They are a bit more wooden than the real ones, but that's cool. Part of me wants to see how they react to the 40k rpm. I mean, wood just loves high speeds and friction right?? Right??

Pretty cool eh? I'm not 100% sure but I think the USB isn't a essential component, but then again it could be a traditional Spanish building technique.

Shown is a rather large brushed motor. No idea why, maybe someone is planning to use Rangles in a drive setup.... Nah, nobody would be that stupid would they?






All for now, and how joyously uninteresting it was!
Ta, Haz.

Even more Massacre for your money

As the title suggests, Massacre will feature quite prominently in the cluster-fuck of gibberish that will make up approximately 90% of this, but first I'll focus on the beetleweight front of things.

Eggbeater has had a rather large design change, rather influenced by the amazing Dominant Mode and other 4wd drumy and beatery things. This should really help the thing be drivable, as there is weight on the motors, and all the wheels, turning should be easier as it is about four miles wide. Can't really tell from any of the CAD's but O-rings are becoming more of a thing in my lighter designs. (totally not because a friend of mine has just bought a lathe and is capable of making me up pulleys for tuppence, no of course not.) The wheels I plan to use are 35mm ish which even with the 1000rpm motors won't make for a speedy robot, but hey. Big fuck-off beater. I don't need speed. These wheels will have a groove for the belt to slave the second wheel off of, and also space for O-ring tires. Not much grip, but they should be more rugged so they can better stand up to the steel floor of the Slaughterhouse and I don't have to replace them after .4 of a femtosecond. The frame of this is 10mm nylon, down from 12mm but I actually have proper armour in the form of 1 and 2 mm titanium and 5mm aluminium. Lots of this design is spinner fodder, but it looks too cool in my eyes, and it will make some great footage if it does get wrecked.

Swish looking beetles out the way, time for some Massacre related ramblings. Recently all of the everything was changed, prompting me to go for a different kind of weapon setup, to more definitely lock myself into a design and not get distracted again (its really too late in the game for massive design tweaks) To do this, I bit the bullet and ordered a motor from hobbyking, fully expecting a box that was just full of angry wasps and a note saying "haha you trusted us" (I've had two friends rather badly fucked over by HK) But no, it arrived quickly and the motor seems to be very nice indeed. I'm more than a little bit in love with it truth be told.  Once I had got over the initial OMGIGOTMYFRISTPARTFORTHISROBOTHOLDME. I took some photos of the motor, then I opened it up and had a shufti inside it. Well it would have been rude not to! It was fairly nice inside, no way of putting a full 8mm shaft in it, but no real worry there. I can use an adaptor or just have a 5mm shaft that steps up to 8mm at the end made up by some kind person.


I then began the fun fun process of putting the motor into CAD. Took way to long, as I decided that late on a Friday night/early Saturday morning was perfect CADing time. In the end it got done, except for some of the detail on the front. all those angles and spacing and curves in Google ketchup? Fuck that royally. Having this cadded up instead of the black tube was nice cos I could plug it into the Ranglebox and be all posh and take pretty screenshots. Man I really need to find something better to do with my spare time.





Fancymotor in place I could deal with the base plate, or more actually the holes that need to go into it. Because the bulkheads and frame need to be pretty much perfect, I don't quite trust myself to fabricate the base and get the holes lined up (despite the fact that the baseplate was the best part of the last featherweight I built) Maybe if I had a bit more experience with metal work and didn't have work around the shed and annoying the neighbours with late night grinding/drilling. Instead I'm cheating. Will get the base plate water-cut from 4mm plate, I personally wanted stainless due to it being fairly cheap  and resistant to rust (my shed is like where rust comes on holiday, but then finds it likes the local area so much it buys a small property and invites its family and friends over to start a brand new life away from the hustle and bustle of the big rust cities) but general opinion was to go to hardox. I will be doing other parts as well, not just the base i.e. parts for the wedge and the wheel guards and probably a beetleweight disc if I feel that way inclined when I come to sending off for quotes.

That somehow brings me onto another point. Wheel guards. *shudders* Now I don't know how why, but I don't seem to be capable of getting a robot to look good with enclosed wheels.
 I like the look of the exposed wheels, its a hideous design flaw, but I almost can justify it purely from an aesthetics point of view. Almost. So wheel guards have to be a thing, trouble is its very hard to get them to not look like absolute total arse! The ones on the first Massacre were worse than the weapon if that's even possible. I might have cracked it this time, yeah it doesn't look great but there is nothing too ugly about it. It did show me Massacre can do a great impression of a tank.

That little voice in my head called Elvis, (emphasis on the little) seemed intent on nagging Massacre into a better robot with suggestions, like "use a proper material for the base" "don't have the robot going 5mph" and "don't take out the drive motors to save weight for a battery to power the drive motors you tit" came up with another cracker. 8mm thick hardened steels are just too weak, 10mm is where it is apparently at, whatever it is. The bar has been made thicker and wider, and unsurprisingly heaver. Its now nesting somewhere around 3.5kg. Arse. That would make for a killer weapon, but not really anything else. I'm going to be fighting weight like a big weight fighty thing. I suppose there are lots of places to loose weight, but most of them require compromise.

Nothing really more to say, only really some pretty pictures. After a little bit of pissing around I was able to get my ketchup drawing of Massacre shoved rather haphazardly into AutoCAD which is pretty cool. Its not actually functional, but it's a pretty picture.

 Also, have a slightly exploded version of Massacre, this is probably what will happen to it during its first fight. But lets hope not eh.

Cheers for reading. Hopefully before too long actual progress will happen.
Haz.