Spinning Tortoise Melty Beatle

I want to stay with a wheel that can survive somehits. I only know of 1 person who tried bb wheels and they wore out quickly. Also, the liteflights have the best rep, but they also wear out after just a few battles.

You'll laugh when I tell you how I grafted/vulcanized the colsons.....took about 2 minutes per wheel....just not sure whether it will help or hinder...just yet

I was out of town for a week, so I haven't had time to ask. . .
So, how DID you graft to colsons (I can always use a laff)

the colsons were mounted on axles, so I chucked them in a drill chuck on a bridgeport.

I held the softer rubber up against the colson and played with the rpm until things got a bit hot.

at the right temp, the softer rubber began to deposit onto the harder colson rubber.

So basically a friction weld....

Took about 2 minutes per wheel to get a nice even coating of the softer rubber onto the colsons.

Actually, this happened by accident. (taking away from my ingenuity now)

I had the colsons and motors and everything mounted in the bot and was trying to load the motors a bit, to get an idea of amperage draw.

For lack of anything better, I held a plastic screw driver handle against the wheel. After a bit, I noticed that the plastic handle melted and deposited onto the colson.

So I scraped it off (it was tough) and tried the experiment...it worked.....

I thought that it was pretty funny , how things work out sometimes...

I haven't really had a chance to do muchtesting yet.....things have been on hold for a few weeks, other priorites.

It would be interesting to see how this type of friction welding would work on a standard bot, because the wheels with softer rubber coating them seemed really grippy.

The soft rubber was from a tailwheel for a model airplane and is quite soft.

If you have some, maybe try depositing some soft bb wheel rubber onto some harder colsons and see how it works out...it doen't take much effort, believe me...once the stuff starts transferring, it goes quickly.

Might be on to something, might not, but it seems that the soft grippy coating on a wheel that will hold up in battle could be a good idea, maybe???

Latest round of fun and games!!!

Funny how things work out or don't for that matter...

I am currently playing with a few different mosfets and continuing to test things out.

Mechanically things were looking great until the latest problem, although possibly minor and easy enough to solve.

The motors, batteries and everything else is staying together and in the bot, until I ran the bot today and literally spent 3 minutes crashing into walls, alu blokcs, etc. at WOT (which at the moment is around 3k).

Finally after running thru 2 bat packs, bench testing showed that 1 motor had stopped working.

This is kind of funny...the problem was that the brush springs were trying to come off their guide posts (rc type motors with typical removable brushes)

one end was still kind of pushing the brush, the other end was still latched in its groove, but the coiled up part of the spring was half off the guide post!!!!! Same with the other brush...

So, I've tried a few things, but will probably end up putting snap ring grooves and a pair of small snap rings on each post to hold

THE FRIGGIN BRUSHES FROM FLYING AWAY!!!!

Not the armature and shaft coming out of the end cap (been there, done that)

Not the magnets slamming against the end of the can (hoping the glue is good)

What's next??? liquid goo oozing out of the batteries?

This style bot is REALLY hard on everything...but it seems to be packing a pretty good punch....!! ???

It's amazing what 400 G's coming to a dead stop can do to a motor...lol

I have a circuit and some mosfets that seem to be holding up well, so far, but I also just received some intelligent ones (thanks Chris) that I will be trying along with an onboard voltage regulator as opposed to the bec that I have been using.

Oh yeah ....I had a bec come apart, resulting in full voltage going to everything....took down some mosfets, but the receiver and other stuff survived it

More testing...having problems with the front motor not wanting to stay together!!! The rear motor is hanging in

https://www.youtube.com/user/ReadytoRumbleCombat#p/u

Decided to spin the bot clockwise and things got a lot better!!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMUCIp_vKA8

Ran thru 5 battery packs with no damage...WooHoo...

Moving forward.....

Latest testing...slowed it down a bit...questions are....

1) Can it compete?

2) Will it hold together?

https://www.youtube.com/user/ReadytoRumbleCombat#p/u/0/eF8h-aOSSIk

looks pretty good to me, only way to know for sure is to have it fight your 3lb stingbot

Not going to happen anytime soon....Sting is semi retired

what happened?

jeeves_m_d wrote:

what happened?

Nothing really...just moving on to other R & D

rjw wrote:

Decided to spin the bot clockwise and things got a lot better!!!!

right hand rule! spin it clockwise, the acceleration will hold it down to the ground!

Dan Curhan wrote:

rjw wrote:

Decided to spin the bot clockwise and things got a lot better!!!!

right hand rule! spin it clockwise, the acceleration will hold it down to the ground!

I don't think that anything can keep it down on the ground.....it's a ufo candidate and kind of wierd looking as well....

It might also soon be brushless (seeing as the brushes don't like the whole centri idea anyhow)

I suspect using brushless will involve microcontroller modulation of the signal going out to the motor (probably via Arduino), so one place to look could be Charles Guan's blog. He's been doing some work on the next version of Lolriokart, and it seems someone has found a way to make an arduino-run ESC (from what I glanced at, that is).

na...it could be a lot simpler than that...so simple, it might be illegal...

Like what? Cutting power to one of the motor phases out intermittently?

Jeff L wrote:

Like what? Cutting power to one of the motor phases out intermittently?

No...try again

Shifting the pwm signal up or down?

Jeff L wrote:

Shifting the pwm signal up or down?

can you elaborate on this and how would you do that?

Shortening or lengthening the frequency of the square wave, but I don't recall the components you'd need to do it. Very cheap ones though.

Nope...that's not it

Odd feats of channel mixing?

Jeff L wrote:

Odd feats of channel mixing?

Closer....

You used a few channel mixers (possibly the one a Spektrum transmitter can do automatically) to first make an elevon signal (aka one stick driving), and then managed to put that through another channel mixer to make a throttle-elevon signal that modulates the throttle based on stick position?

Actually how Rich Olson's code works to begin with is....Elevator/Aileron stick drives the bot and throttle controls the speed of rotation...so no mixing going on there at all...it's pretty straight forward.

But none of that really has much to do with going to a brushlesss setup (or attempting to).