LOLCANO 3 or 4 who knows wat # we are up to now

crowconor wrote:

yah to be honest if we werent done with the bot afer this year i would be redesigning the horns, their a pain, not just saying that so you dont use them, theres a better way to do it

Why are you guys retiring the bull? its proven to be an awesome bot that has kicked lolcano booty repeatedly

and if you don't mind me asking what would be such a far better way to do it?(if its top secret i understand)

also turtle were you one of the judges on saturday?

my senior year was the first year we did the bull and the team i had then has mostly graduated other than my brother. when he graduates none of the original team will be left and our team likes to bring a variation of a design every competition the bull is pretty optimized so its logical to retire it with the last of the original team leaving the high school

im the senior , the way we look at it is why have someone drive a bot and take care of it when they know nothing themselves, they will have to design one from scratch and learn to write code and mill it themselves

hence the failure of a sophomore team that was the Rhino who also didnt take our advice and try to use somethin other than horns

I posted on a debate about active weapons and not about the competition. Jeeves is a excellent addition to this forum. He's constantly coming up with new ideas and comes here looking for and giving advice. Look through his post, he usually explains the situation, maybe gives a picture and ask for suggestions. Look at one of your recent threads "hey how fast does everyone spin there weapons, I wanna compare it to ours". Maybe explain your weapon and what it spins at and ask for comparisons of others. This is a big reason the lolcano thread is 12 pgs and yours maybe got 6 replies. Posting threads in the right place always helps too.

Jeeves I like the newest idea. I would probably round off the sharp points on the horns. Just seems like the would get hung up on the seems of the arena (and the MA arenas arent even bad). Im guess your planning on sitcking with the big wheels. That design would be pretty cool with a three wheel design like the minnesota full body drum.

i can say from personal experience that you will without a doubt have problems with those horns

If i can get my 4 wheel square boxes to work I will try them out... but I dont expect to because there is just too much friction every where! and switching to connecting them with belts is a real hassle.

Thats why i like the huge wheels because there a ten less things that could possibly fail.

Actually the more i think about it, i could always run with out any side plates because the wheels themselves would prevent the beater from hitting the arena wall. Instead i may use the weight to make a wedge plate that would attach to the shaft. A really big hinged wedge.

Do you think spinning the beater would also cause it to roll forward? well i guess backwards lol

Well i guess the wedge plate would be locked to the shaft, and the hinge motion would come from the wheels pivoting relative to the ground?

but yes right now with out the side plates/wedge when we turn the beater on it rolls backwards suprisingly fast

I'm still not completly sure how you have your drive setup but I'd have to imagine that it could be fairly simple to make a wedge that clamps to your shaft.
For some reason it has me thinking about wills ROFL

In concept it is identical to rofl, the only real difference is that i have wheels instead of of arms...

in other new, Hopefully this neater electronics arrangement should prevent future self inflicted reciever ejection

wow i really like the design of that, did you have a problem with rolling with the square sides at BATM? i would even try to use a piece of thin sheet metal, like .030, or something and wrap that around the electronics part. then drill and tap some wholes to put on there, bending sheet metal makes it very strong, i think you would be pleased with that

plus with the sheet metal youd make the electronics way safer from both self ejection and direct hits

We wanted to wrap, we actually have a wrap of steel made already

its just that the way it was b4 we just stuffed all the electronics in whereever they looked like they fit, and wasted alott of that internal space.

essentially the thing looked like a mess of wires, and you had to unplug the battery to charge it. And that meant removing the wrap, which in a design like this is hard to do.

With this neater arangement i have room to add a charge port for quick plug ins that wont require untangling everything to get at the battery.

Adding charge ports in our bots have been a life saver, it weighs just a few ounces and prevents plenty of mistakes.

the render is so much prettier when its big!!!!
http://buildersdb.com/botpics/8128.jpg

So I am really considering going against everything I have said and switching to a drum with roller bearings rather than the beaters with bushings I have now

not a bad change, would def protect the inners better.

So these Roller bearings are AWESOME compared to by older bushings, the beater just keeps spinning and spinning.

Since we are still waiting for the drum parts to finally get here, Lolcano is be put on the back burner so we can finish the FBS.

hows your bots doing? you guys are going to be coming to the rally right?

ugh, we have really been focusing on the FBS design so not much progress...

we switched the beater bar to roller bearings which has proven to be a great move

fortified the internals and reshaped the battery pack to fit better like the picture i had posted earlier

but its still in pieces right now.

We will definetly be at Ralley, but motorama keeps looking iffy

on the other hand the FBS looks badass, pics will be uploaded on monday when we install the new motors

nice, that would suck if you miss motorama. i wish we could've gone to motorama but it wasnt feasible for us, good luck though! i cant wait to see the pics.

haha what do i mean..

he means wasn't feasible
Im excited to see the new pics too slash to see lolcano at the rally

i guess i shouldn't say moto is iffy, because we already payed for it so we HAVE to go...

what i meant was idk if lolcano will be ready in current form we may have to pull one of the older frames out of storage, but that call won't be made till monday night

Do you guys have plans for when your leaving/getting to harrisburg so on?

I'm really looking forward to getting away from school and enjoying myself, especially after this week and since next isnt looking to promising either haha

we intend to leave right after school friday(3:30ish) and arrive in harrisburg around 10-11pm that night.
obviously we will arrive too late to see any of the antweight or fairyweights fight that day so we will just go straight to the hotel.

as for the return trip, we will be leaving sunday as soon as it ends(5ish im thinking) with hopes of being home by midnight.

7 hour drive with 7 people and 3 robots in a honda odyssey....sounds fun