Dale's Homemade Robots

Robot Battles 2014

This year I competed in Microbattles on Sunday and Robot Battles on Monday. Both events were single elimination format due to time restrictions. The Microbattles event is for 1 and 3 pound bots that fight in a fully enclosed arena. I brought 1# Dead Air with the expectation that he might be destroyed by a horizontal spinner since there tends to be several at this event and Dead Air is not built to handle them. 3D printed plastic sides can€™t take that much impact. I was 100% correct. Dead Air came home dead. He was destroyed by DDT built by Jamison Go who went on to win the 1# championship.

Things went better the next day at Robot Battles with 12# OmegaForce and 30# Overthruster. OmegaForce had been modified with new dual acting smart wedges and had much needed tuneups and general maintenance. Last years accidental Van de Graaff static electricity issue was resolved with bronze bearings replacing nylon and several grounding straps. It performed almost flawlessly. It scored 6 wins and 1 draw for the 12# championship. The final was against Tetanus Shot from Jason Brown (Evil Robots inc). The only damage was a spring that fell off one of the wedges after a brutal hit.

Overthruster had brand new folding smart wedges which worked pretty good except for ripping up parts of the stage. It performed well overall but due to a couple of driving errors did not win. Score was 2 wins and 2 losses. Overthruster was equipped with a GoPro video camera to capture bots eye view video. During the rumble Overthruster lost all power and became a passive observer with the onboard camera. This was caused by a 1 inch long #20 jumper wire in the main power circuit getting hot enough to melt solder and falling out of the pc board. I replaced it with larger gauge wire. #20 was way too small and never should have been installed there. Duh.

Charles Guan, Team Testbot, won both the 30# championship and the 30# rumble with Uberclocker.