Final design update leading up to September Scuffle in Houston.
I've gone ahead and decided to go through and highlight the major design changes leading up to this next event, but first, RENDERS.
Design Changes
I'm going to go ahead and list off the major design changes from the previous iterations.
Full HDPE Chassis No more titanium for Honeycomb. Even though it was very durable, it weighed too much to iterate the design much farther than where it already was especially for updating a new drive system.
Drive Pod System Honeycomb will now have pre-assembled hot swappable drive pods that will heavily increase drive reliability through indirect drive, 1/4" steel wheel shafts, and now wheel guards.
Casted Wheels I'm not sure how this will turn out, but the hope is to decrease weight and have a more robust drive through custom casted 3D printed nylon wheels with a steel reinforcement bushing. Might attempt a reinforced nylon or reinforcement screws down the road if the parts delaminate too easily, but figured I would try out non-reinforced to start. Hopefully I'll be able to get the polyurethane casted in an obnoxious yellow without excessively negative material property effects.
Weapon Assembly I've moved away from press fit steel on an aluminum stock and will now be doing a sandwich weapon constrained by 2 1/4" grade 8 steel bolts down its length. The idea will be to tap the fingertech pully so I can directly screw down and constrain the assembly fully with the 2 bolts without the need of additional fastening hardware. This will save a significant amount of weight as well getting rid of the aluminum hex stock allowing me to allocate more weight to the drive system.
I'll try to get some manufacturing updates out over the next few weeks, but if not you can look forward to a event recap video from September Scuffle.
This is a long overdue update on where Honeycomb is for competitions and design updates. I'm currently working on the development of a new bot and will be updating in the near future.
Current Bot Rank: 56
To give a general overview and summary of some issues that arose with mechanical and electrical design.
Bot randomly loosing power -> mounted the power turn switch directly to the chassis to allow for tighter turning to really get good connection for the power.
Reliability of 3D printed parts -> moved to machining the plastic components out of solid HDPE for better material properties and rigidity.
Ease of Electrical Service -> Moved to WAGO clamp connectors for power distribution for all systems. Directly soldering motors to ESCs without intermediate connectors. Improved serviceability and reliability.
Tire/Drive Train Reliability -> Full redesign of drive system. Moving to a drive pod system for serviceability, reliability, and pushing power. No longer using a direct drive system, now using gearing to reduce shock put directly into the drive motors. (See below) Need to redesign weapon assembly to save some weight, will probably move to a sandwich design and replace the center aluminum hex stock with plastic (probably HDPE, or 3D printed nylon)
Honeycomb 4.0
Santa Slam - December 2020 Placement: 2nd Place
Had a pretty good event overall here, my soldering needed some work as my power switch got damaged and I had to emergency solder a link connector for my final fight which ended up failing in the first collision. Overall since this event my soldering skills have improved tremendously and I think if I had the skill I have now then I could have taken home the win. This was also the event where I was randomly loosing power due to my power switch being under tightened, but that was addressed by the next event.
Spinners Spring 2021 Placement: 4th?
I didn't have my camera setup with me at this event, so I'm borrowing some of Peter's footage of our fights from this event. Go check out his channel here for some other cool videos of his bot Ablation competing -> Repeat Robotics
NHRL July 2021 Placement: 25th of 123
In July of last year, I finally made my pilgrimage to the holy site of all 3lbs combat robotics. Norwalk Havoc in Norwalk, CT. I had a great tournament and ended up gong 3-2 over all with my first loss to Silent X by Jamison Go. You will probably know Jamison Go from Team SawBlaze on BB, and my second loss to Animus by David Rush, who competes and drives for team Malice on BB. Great event, great experience, I hope to come back in the near future with a more competitive Honeycomb 4.0 and really show what I'm able to do.
I am excited to announce that SendCutSend has extended an initial sponsorship offer to Btown Sting. Honeycomb has been intentionally designed so that all parts are off the shelf, 3D printable, or Laser Cut at SendCutSend. I've been having all of my G5 Titanium, 6061, and AR500 components manufactured by SendCutSend for over a year now, and I've always been super satisfied with the quality, accuracy, and quick turn around I get on my parts. Even before this, I always recommended SendCutSend to people whenever they asked how I fabricated my parts.
It's been a while since I've updated the blog. I've been a bit lazy on it because of the lack of events due to covid, so I've been taking it easy just waiting for more events to open up. Since this event in February 2020, I've only competed in one other event. I'm going to spend the next day going over design changes and other updates related to the bot.
Event Recap
Round 1 - Dark Destroyr
I actually didn't get any video of this fight as we didn't have time to set up the camera and begin recording before the match started. Dark Destroyr was a fully 3D printed bot by a rookie team, I believe this was their first event ever. Dark destroyer was made mostly of PLA and PVC tubes. Once the match started I gave them one good hit and the PLA components shattered prompting a tap out from their team. 1-0 for the day.
Round 2 - H5N1
I've fought H5N1 previously, and I was super excited to get to fight them again. At the previous event at the same location they ended up winning the entire tournament, so I was super excited to get to fight a well designed destructive bot. Off the bat I noticed that my actuated ground scraping forks were working very well allowing me to get underneath their wedge and get the best of most exchanges. However, this is where I noticed that on every hit, my bot would pivot forward and the weapon would catch the ground sending my bot backwards as well (which cant be good for my belts or weapon motor). After a few good exchanges I eventually dislodged their top panel exposing their battery for the win. 2-0 for the day.
Round 3 - Snowfire
Sorry for the crap picture, I didn't have a better one, so I ripped it from the video.
After my morning look around the pits and watching their fights from earlier in the day, I figured that Snowfire would probably be my toughest opponent. Snowfire is a 2WD robot using the Fingertech Beater Bar as their primary weapon. Snowfire has a very rugged build with the only majorly vulnerable components being the foam wheels and weapon belts. During this fight once again I was noticing that during most exchanges even if I got the better hit in, my robot's weapon would catch the ground sending me backwards not allowing me to capitalize on any good hits I gave out. During this match I managed to launch Snowfire with their weapon at full speed into the acrylic side wall, punching out one of the panes. After much back and forth I eventually lost one side of my drive and was pitted by Snowfire. 2-1 for the day.
Round 4 - H5N1 pt. 2
We ended up meeting H5N1 a second time in the losers bracket. During this match it went similarly to the first one, with my forks really getting underneath their wedge giving me the upper hand in almost every exchange. We end up getting entangled a couple times, with the second time us staying entangled for the majority of the match before a stoppage was called. After the second entanglement they were stuck on their side with no way to self right. 3-1 for the day.
Round 5 - Snowfire pt. 2
Now that we've fought our way through the Losers Bracket, we are once again fight Snowfire in the finals match. Unfortunately for us, Snowfire quickly gets the better of the first exchange and removes one of our wheels, prompting a tap out from me. 3-2 for the day taking 2nd place with our only loses being to Snowfire.
Post Tournament Design Criticism
Identifiable Issues
On most exchanges due to the design of my side plates my robot tips forward causing the weapon to catch on the ground sending me backwards. This prevents me from being able to capitalize on my opponent while they're in a vulnerable position, and this also can't be very good for my weapon belts and motors.
Just as they have been historically my wheels are very brittle and tend to get broken way too often. They need to be a more durable material.
My weapon speed seems to be really low, I'm pretty sure that with the 1500kv motor and battery at full charge its only going about 150mph tip speed which is fairly low especially for beetleweight bots and I'm ending matches with over 50% or more of my usable battery left. I think if I got my weapon spinning faster I could really start delivering those super destructive knockout hits and really send robots flying to the roof.
Proposed Solutions
1.
Old Side Plate
New Side Plate
The idea behind this new design is that the weapon will now be supported directly under the shaft instead of 1 inch behind. With the old side plate I was essentially creating a fulcrum for the bot to pivot on with the weapon on one side and the rest of the body on the other. After an exchange the bot would pivot forward causing the weapon to catch on the ground sending me backwards. With the new plate, I have essentially removed the fulcrum now that the weapon is supported directly underneath. This should eliminate the bot from tilting forward and better improve my weight distribution which should also give me more traction on my wheels.
2.
I got polycarb wheel water jet cut. I really like the sandwich design with the rubber slips, so I'm going to continue to use that, but just replace the brittle acrylic with the new polycarb rounds.
3.
I'm upgrading to a 2700kv Propdrive V2 motor. This should push my weapon speed to around that 250mph sweet spot and really start to damage and remove parts from other bots.
We ended up finishing 2nd at Maker X Ohio. Big congrats to Snowfire for taking the tournament undefeated. I'm gonna throw together a quick video of our fights, we were unable to get our first and last fight due to extenuating circumstances, but we have our 2 fights against H5N1 and 1 fight against Snowfire. I'll probably do a full event recap at some point soon whenever I finish with the video, but with Midterms this week I'm quite busy.
As far as pros and cons go I'll make a quick list, a lot of these points are relative to the old design.
Pros:
Much higher damage, with my weapon assembly being about 70% heavier than the previous we were dishing out much more devastating hits consistently.
Ground scraping forks were pivotal to us winning most of our fights as they allowed us to get under other people's wedges and really toss them around.
ABS and the aluminum standoffs proved to be a lot more robust than the old design and allowed me to give and receive many more hits than I used to be able to take.
The grade-8 steel dead shaft significantly increased the durability of the bot by moving the load from the 3D printed parts to into the weapon assembly.
Making the 3D printed parts simply dividers rather than load bearing/structural components improved reliability, and even when a part would crack/chip it usually wont warrant a full replacement.
Looks cool AF.
Cons:
With the new weight of the weapon, on lower friction surfaces driving becomes difficult/impossible due to the weight distribution being quite front heavy.
Had a scare and got weighed at 3.2lbs, even though I've calculated the weight at exactly 2lbs15.7oz. I've also used multiple scales of a higher accuracy to weigh the bot prior to the event consistantly weighing in at 2lbs15.7oz +-.1oz. I'm going to chalk that up to inaccurate scale used by the event, because it kept fluctuating between 2.9, 3.0, and 3.2lbs. This scale also didn't have accuracy greater than one decimal place, and no oz or fraction of ounce weight accuracy. We ended up checking weight on other scales and concluded that the scale wasn't accurate.
Improvements:
Move the the fulcrum point where the skids touch the ground up .75" to put more weight on the wheels and improve traction.
Lower mid plate print density to allow for the fulcrum improvement.
Up the KV rating of motor from 1100 to 1500, which should increase the max speed of the weapon significantly.
A bit late, but I'm updating a couple posts leading up to MakerX Columbus Combat 2020 next weekend. First of all I'd like to recap Taproom Tapout and what it means for me.
Taproom Tap Out was a fairly successful tournament with 2 strong wins, 1 good loss, and 1 fight of me getting my shit tossed by a Weta. Since I already posted the video I don't feel like there is much more I can add that would be worth while.
The biggest thing after this tournament is that I no longer have any spare metal parts for Honeycomb. I've been working hard to get my new bot up and running.
The bottom image is not a fully accurate representation of the new design, didn't have a most recent render on hand.
List of changes: Old -> New
3D printed weapon motor mount -> aluminum weapon motor mount now attached to the frame with aluminum standoffs
3" total height -> 2-3/8" total height
2-1/4" chassis height -> 1-1/4" chassis height
live 3/8" aluminum weapon shaft -> dead 5/16" grade 8 steel weapon shaft (also changed to roller bearings instead of ball bearings)
side plates 1/4" aluminum -> 1/8" titanium
3" acrylic wheels -> 2-3/8" banebots wheels
sprocket and chain -> belts and pulley
polycarbonate wedge -> ar500 forks
4140 weapon teeth -> ar500 weapon teeth
drum design -> new hex drum design which should be robust and significantly heavier
no z-support standoffs -> z-support standoffs to help make the robot more robust between the top and bottom plates
flat back plate -> rounded back-plate so I can no longer get stuck on my back.
no side armor -> side armor to protect the shaft mounting point
Hopefully all of these changes will solve reliability issues, up damage, and potentially lead to more consistent performance across tournaments and throughout the day at tournaments. The bot was also redesigned to be 100% laser cut with the only part needing to be machined being the aluminum drum that the teeth mount on. I am also planning on completely removing the lexan wedge option and plan on potentially introducing a large fork/full wedge option to deal with some of the bigger spinners that have historically given me trouble in competitions. This would involve removing the weapon and all related sub assemblies and replacing all that weight with said wedge/forks. This modular option will not be ready for the next tournament, but this new design was created with this potential option in mind.
