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!

Router is mounted!

When I was figuring out how to mount my Dewalt router to my CNC machine I ran into a little "What came first, the chicken or the egg?" Scenario.  I could have hacked together some router mounts but I really wanted some nice and uniform mounts made from UHMW that where beyond my capabilities to make by hand.  So I cheated and went over to my cousins house to use his CNC router to make the mounts =) They came out great, and seeing his machine cut them out really motivated me to get mine done!  The picture above shows the two mounts fresh off the machine.

I wanted the mounts to clamp the router tightly so I machined two pockets into each one so that a bolt and nut could be used to clamp the router in place.  I put a slice down the center of the two pockets and drilled hole in them for the bolt to go.  It is a very solid mount!

In this picture you can see the motor mounts mounted to the Z axis and the router inserted into them.  Even without the two bolts in place to pinch the router it is a very solid and tight fit!

Here is the machine from a distance.  All that is left is installing the motor and ballscrew for the X axis, building and installing the cutting table.  After that it's just a little paint and wiring up the electronics and I'll be able to try it out!

Speaking of the electronics, here is my controller box.  You can see the Breakout board, three stepper drivers, relay board and power supply in the lower half of the box.  The lid contains two fans, the on and off switch, some fuses and a speed controller for the router.

Here is the electronic box with the lid installed.  The white household plug on the lid is used to power the router and the dust remover.  They are each independently controlled by the relay board from the computer to turn each device on and off automatically as needed!

It's coming together

Since I finished the gantry for the machine the next thing I needed to do was build the base.  I didn't have a big enough workbench in my garage to put the machine on so I built this extension on the end of my work bench.  I spent a lot of time making sure it was level and flat so that the machine will sit evenly.

In this picture you can see the base of the machine starting to take shape!  The can of Mt Dew (the official drink of my garage) is sitting in the front corner of the machine to show scale.  This is a pretty large machine! You can also see that I have placed the Gantry in the frame rails so I could see if everything is coming out like it is drawn in the plans.  More to come soon!