It's been a while! If you have been wondering what I have been up to out in my garage, here it is:

It's a remote controlled robot that has a slot in the top that you can put various targets. The whole idea is that the robot is "bullet proof" against .22's and shot gun blasts so as your plinking away at the target payload, it doesn't matter if you hit the robot.

Here is the robot base by itself. Everything you see here is made from steel and welded together. The robot has four motors (on for each wheel) which provide it with 4WD. It is pretty good at running around in the foothills without getting stuck.

Here is is driving around.

And here it is taking some fire! It's been a fun project for sure! We are currently building the website and tooling up to make and sell a batch of them, so if you want one watch this space for more info!

Getting ready for the games!

Robo Games is fast approaching and I have started putting HotStuff back together.  The robot will look really Similar to last time, but I will be making a few small changes to hopefully fix the issues I had last year.

Last year I lost all four drive motors in my final match due to them overheating.  I had to run three matches in under an hour, two of them back to back and it was just to much for my poor little motors to handle. 

My Solution to this problem is to utilize the exhaust from my Co2 powered lifting arm.  The exhaust comes out ice cold every time I cycle the grabber or lifter on my bot and up until now I have just vented it into the robot, but now I will flow it directly into my motors, should help keep them cool. 

In the above picture you can see the holes I drilled and tapped in my motors to be able to screw in an air fitting.

This is a Sheet of .125 6-4 Titanium I picked up on Ebay.  I will be replacing the .25" thick lexan wedges on the front of my robot with it.

How am I making the weight for the Titanium wedges? By replacing the three heavy valves on the right with the three light weight valves on the left.

The old valves weigh 2.5 pounds.

The new ones weigh just over half a pound.

Here is the robot as it sits today, more to come as the games get closer!



Coming together

Only a few days left before we leave for Robothon!

Here is a picture of one of the twins almost done, just needs the weapon bar bolted on and the battery cover made.  I went a little over kill on the "on" status LED.  The entire robot glows blue!

Here is the twin in a pile of cnc cut parts!  There is about 20 hours of CNC time on each robot, good thing all you have to do is set up the material and then hit go on the CNC machine! More to come!

New Robots!

Sorry It has been so long since I updated this blog!  Life gets busy (Which means my wife gets demanding with the "Honey DO list") I have been able to sneak in some robot building time however and I just thought I would take a second to share what I have been up to.

I have spent a lot of time designing a 12 pound spinner robot to take to the WAR event in Seattle next month. I finally got the design nailed down and have started cutting out parts. Here is what things should look like when the robot is all done. I am actually building two of these robots so that my niece and nephew can drive them at the competition. Should be fun if/when they have to fight each other =)

  Here is the robot with its top off!  I'm trying something new for this robot, I call it sandwich construction. The frame/armor will be made of 5 CNC cut pieces of 1/2" thick Lexan with pockets for all the compnents. I will then stack them on top of one another and run 8 bolts through to hold everything together.

There are a lof of custom aluminum and plastic parts on this robot so I have turned to my trusty CNC machine that I built last year to make them.  This is a chunk of 1.5" thick aluminum that is about to become a weapon pulley/blade hub.

4 hours later I have my part!  I love having a robot that makes parts for my other robots.  I have to make all these parts twice since I am building twin robots so here is another chunk of aluminum ready for four more hours of CNC work.

I put the pulley on my lathe to cut the round profile for the belt to fit into.  After a tip from Kevin at Team Velocity I am using large O rings as drive belts for the weapons.  I made the groove wide and deep enough in the pulley for a 1/4" round belt.  You can see there are three male rounded drive cogs on top of the pulley.  The blade will have the female version of this pattern cut into the center to transfer the power.

Here is the pulley from the back.  I hollowed out as much meterial as I could to get the weight down, they ended up at 5oz each.  You can see the bonze bearings I am using, the weapon will rotate around a dead shaft that will help stiffen the frame.

A little more work on the CNC machine and lathe and I have the smaller pulley to go on the weapon motor.  Instead of driving the pulley with the motor shaft I bolted the pulley on the back of the can, right where the Propeller mount is supposed to go.

Here is the first frame piece fresh off the CNC machine!  It looks pretty snazzy and it is extremely light weight.

Just for fun I through in the parts to get an idea of how everything will fit, looking good!  There is still a lot to do before the competition so more posts to come!

Hot Stuff - Getting ready!

Batman shot!  I have been putting my new CNC machine to good use as you can see.  I can't believe I ever did things like that side armor manually!

Here is a little better shot of the side armor, you can see the pockets in the underside to lighten things up a bit.  You can also see the "Hot Stuff" logo I engraved into the top of the aluminum drive pod.  I think it looks pretty good!

Here is a shot of the new bumper on the back of the bot.  There are a lot of nasty spinner robots going to the games this year and I needed something besides the complex and somewhat fragile grab/lift arm to slam into them.  This "spinner stopper" is a 1/2" thick and two feet wide chunk of lexan.  It is bolted to the back of the robot with two massive 5/8-18 flat head bolts made of stainless steel.  More to come as the games get closer! 

Finished!

The router is done!  Here it is in all its smurf colored glory.  Here is it cutting out an S that Kassie designed.

It's alive!

My cousin came over yesterday to help me get my router set up and everything seems to work great!  It can do 176" per minute rapids which is plenty fast for my needs.  As you can see the machine is not quite done because I wanted to test everything before I finished it in case something didn't work right.  All seems ok so it's time to get it done!