New Bot Design Pros and Cons (Maker X Event Recap Coming Soon)

The new and improved Honeycomb V2.

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. 

New Bot For Next Weekend

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.

Taproom Tap Out Video