We're well into Robot-Mode here at Team Radicus, and are itching to get the fleet built up for Motorama 2012 in February. We've got a lot of neat ideas we want to build, but before we can get going on that we need a place to build. Unfortunately the garage Build Space has gotten a bit messy over the last few months, so we need to get organized before we can start building. But not only did we get organized, we actually got a 'bot up and running! Hit Back after viewing an image.
As you can tell, things have gotten a bit out of hand out here - Christmas stuff has piled up, there's shavings everywhere, parts strewn about, and not a lot of space to work in. Time to roll up our sleeves and get to it.
Slowly working our way around to throwing out junk, clearing up the floor, and generally organizing things to be able to have some elbow room. Unfortunately we managed to completely clog up the Shop-Vac, which hindered us a bit, but we pressed on.
Making headway - we can see a patch of floor! One thing we decided to do is to put up a TV in here. It was on sale at BestBuy, and has an integrated Blu-Ray player with Netflix access, so during marathon build sessions we can have some background entertainment for those long evenings of tapping ...
It's a 32" TV, and fits perfectly between the two cabinets, and has a moveable mount so we can tilt it around. Nifty!
This is as good as it's going to get for now, so we're finally ready to break out some parts, and see what's what after the last Motorama.
We're going to start by stripping down the 'bots to see what parts and pieces are good, so we have an inventory ready for rebuilding with. Here we're stripping down Formidable Fustigator 1.0 to see if the weapon motor and ESC are in good shape.
Next out of the box is Cantankerous Cowpoke 3.0. At the end of Motorama 2011 it was immobile, so we took it apart, and verified that the Victor 883s were fine - it was the two drive motors that had both burned up. Fortunately we have a lot of spare miniEV motors, and so we pulled the pinion gears from the dead motors and pressed them onto replacements.
Once the motors were reassembled it was time to put the 'bot back together. We'd recharged the batteries, and Lauren took over the assembly process, as this will be her 'bot for Moto2012, so she needs to get to know the ins and outs of it.
Meanwhile, another fine soldering job by Toni, putting leads on the replacement motors - it may be ugly, but they didn't fall off, so that ought to do!
A clean, organized Build Space, with Top Gear playing in the background, and robot parts being assembled in the foreground. Is there any better way to spend a Sunday afternoon? :-)
After a afternoon of cleaning, repairing, replacing, and learning, the last few bolts go into the 'bot, and we're ready to take it for a test-drive! Everything looked ready to go, but ...
We put the 'bot on the ground, powered it up, and hit the stick on the transmitter, and: there was movement! For a second or so, then nothing. Grrr. We opened the 'bot up to find the Battery Eliminator had blow up. It was rated to 23V, and we're running on freshly charged 6S batteries, so it's our guess that the voltage was just a little too high for the BEC. We swapped it out for one rated to 40V, but then found out the Hobby King receiver was dead too, and it was the only one we had, so we swapped it for an OrangeRx, bound it to the Spektrum DX6i transmitter, and tried again.
The video was after turning the Dual Rates down to 25%, and Lauren was able to keep from running into the street just fine. She's still working on the Left/Right-When-The-'Bots-Facing-You thing ... but that's okay - we have three months of practicing to come! Hurray! One 'bot done ... now on to other things ...
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