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.