#WeWantSeason3

Everyone in the BattleBots community is eagerly awaiting a Season 3 announcement. Last time this year we were putting together our Season 2 application, and then spending our holidays eagerly awaiting a phone call.

With Season 3 not yet announced, we are worried about whether BattleBots will be renewed for another season at all – and if it is, how much time we will all have to build. Last season, we were one of the later acceptances – with only 2 months to order parts & build. This added a fair bit of stress and uncertainty for our team. We’re hoping that if Season 3 is to go ahead, all teams will have significantly more time to find sponsors, order parts, and test out different builds. We also hope that we will be able to give our sponsors some more airtime in return for their continued support.

Well, we miss the days when we spent all of our evenings working in the garage, so we put together a photo album to showcase all of the fun (and troublesome) moments. We hope you enjoy browsing our photos, and also take a few minutes to watch our Season 2 application video 🙂

We appreciate all of the support that we received for Season 2, and hope that you’ll be there cheering us on for Season 3!

The Eh Team

Final touches

We’ve been working really hard this Easter weekend wrapping up our first completed Bucktooth Burl. A couple of things were intentionally left out of the original CAD design (it’s hard to model wires, connectors, etc.) so we’ve been adding our final touches.

The batteries are now mounted onto aluminum plates that are bolted down to the body. The batteries themselves are secured with Velcro straps. We’re very happy with how clean this looks.

A view of the aluminum mountain plates for our batteries.

Some of our beautiful wiring, and batteries.

 

We’ve also needed to cheese out some of our less critical components (wheel disks) to save some weight. Bucktooth was ~6lbs over the 250lb weight limit. We’re trying hard to not have to reduce the number of weapon disks that we have up front!

Cheesed, and yet-to-be cheese wheel disks.

And of course, anyone who doesn’t have their hands in Bucktooth #1 is busy working on spare parts. Here’s a photo of Albert with wheels #3 and #4.

Albert cutting our wheel rubber out.

Ship date is in 5 days for us, so stay tuned!  We should have a lot of updates coming 🙂

Julia

Plasma cutting, wheels & electronics

This week has been incredibly busy! Our team is in the shop every day from 16:00 to 21:30 working on various aspects of the robot, and we’re putting in 12 hour days on the weekends.

We have a few things going on in parallel,

Plasma cutting – Brian has been fighting with the plasma cutter for a while now. We learned how to use the plasma cutter last week, and since then it has been producing fantastic quality cuts on all of our 10 gauge and 1/4″ steel. However, it’s not playing nice with the 1/2″ steel that we’re trying to make beaver teeth out of.

It seems we’ve finally worked out all the kinks, but I’m scared of saying that “we’re past the hiccup stage” …(for the third time this week).

Wheels – A few of our team members have been focusing our efforts on our wheel design. The wheels are going to be made out of 11 layers of rubber sandwiched between 2 plates of steel.

There’s been some trouble cutting the rubber – our laser cutters aren’t able to cut all the way though, while drilling / punching out the rubber is proving to be futile, even with dish soap in the mix.

We’re still working on some ideas to save time on wheel assembly, but we’re happy with the traction and the shock absorption that they provide. We hope to have two full wheels assembled in the coming days to assess whether there is enough rigidity in them for their application – we might need to increase the outside plate diameters or add a plastic spacer as a middle layer.

Electronics– The weapon motor controller we are using seems to be a bit picky with his inputs, so Kyle & Albert have been working on interfacing the receiver to the motor controller via various circuits that they come up with. We’re very thankful to have FingerTech Robotics in Saskatoon to give us a hand with the electronics!

A Day in the Shop

Today has been a pretty typical day in the shop. We’ve gone from plasma table to grinding to bending some of our body panels. It’s been quite a learning curve as both the CNC plasma table, and CNC press brake are new to us.

Some of the parts are coming out use-able but not ideal, so I guess we’re going to have lots of spares! Thanks again to Prairie Machine & Parts for the steel donation.

Julia & Payton

Build Log – February 27

Almost end of February and we are in the thick of it!  Two of our members returned from vacation a week ago and we’ve been furiously finishing up the mechanical design.

We think we have come up with a pretty great wheel design that should provide protection and lots of traction. This is about as much as we’re willing to reveal!

Electronic parts are trickling in and hoping to start building up a testing jig within the week.  We are looking to start cutting out pieces for a mock-up as quickly as possible, then cutting metal in a week or two.

It is going to be a busy month for us but overall the team is excited for competition and I think we will be proud of Bucktooth Burl when it is completed!

Gotta go.  We’re setting up plasma table!

Brian

Update – February 4th

Hello and welcome to February!  Not a ton happening this week so far, but here’s where we’re all at:

• Two members of our team, Pat and Payton, have decided that lying on a beach in Hawaii is more important to them than our robot.  Unfortunately, we use Pat’s shop for most of the meetings, so the rest of us will have to meet elsewhere.
• We’ve got most of the electronics ordered for Bucktooth Burl, we’re just waiting on them to come in.
• We are hard at work putting the 3D model together.  Hopefully this will be done by the time Pat returns so we can use the plasma table to get everything cut!

In the meantime, here is a sneak peak at one of the motors we’ll be using.  I am going to attempt to assist Nicholas with modelling by trying to make a model of it tonight, unless I get distracted by other amenities….

 

– Brian

New Toys Yay!

We have just received our brand new Shop Sabre CNC router and plasma table. Time for some robot building action!

 

Albert

We’re In!

Writing this on January 25th, just a few days after we found out that we’ve been accepted to BattleBots Season 2!

Our team is stoked to compete, but also a bit terrified with the amount of work that we have ahead of us.

We drew up our schedule for the next 2 months, and there’s a lot to do. Here are the items at the top of the list:

1. Order all of the electrical components ASAP. Most of them are coming from the US/China and have long lead times.
2. Redesign the CAD model. After starting on the above, we found out that some suppliers simply don’t ship to Canada. We’ve found replacement components, but their dimensions differ from the originals.
3. Sponsors, sponsors, sponsors! This is going to be an expensive bot and an expensive trip down to LA. We need to put together a sponsorship package and start contacting local companies.

Once all the parts start coming in, both electrical and mechanical folks will be hard at work!

Thanks for reading,

Julia