Zero Traction 2

The second competition I went to was only 2 weeks after the first, where I traveled this time out to PA. Having seen some serious design flaws with the 1st bot, I redesigned and rebuilt most of the bot over those 2 weeks. The two big changes were: Much larger pancake motor, and a much larger, flatter drive base.

My first match was against the same builder as SMEEE, who arrived with an interesting 3d printed tracked bot. The weapon worked for the first few seconds than stopped soon after! As it turns out, the screws that held my motor onto the chassis were too long and were pushing up on the motor windings, causing one phase to be shorted to the chassis! I had a fingertech switch which (I found out later) grounded the top plate, in effect, the chassis too. So one phase of the motor was getting grounded, and there was no way for the motor to get up to speed. The other builder was nice enough to try to help me get the weapon up to speed later in the match, but nothing I could do could cause it to get going, so I took my first loss for the day.

The second match was against a kit drum spinner. To my surprise, the bot spun up, drove well, and was able to knock off the wheel of the drum spinner on its first hit. For the rest of the match I continued delivering hits, but not completely immobilizing him. Finally by the end, I got a “bad” hit which flipped my bot over. Though since it was in the last 10 seconds, I didn’t get counted out, and I was awarded my first ever combat win by judges decision

The 3rd match was against a kit wedge by the name of Thunder Child. After my 2nd match, I was having drive issues where a wheel kept getting jammed in one direction. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to fix this by the time the match came around, so I limped to the starting tile. I remember Thunder Child as a fairly good wedge bot with a decent driver, so the match wasn’t much more then my bot getting pushed around until eventually I had some wires short internally, which caused me to lose all control of the bot. Even though I had passed fail safe earlier in the day, somehow the weapon got stuck in an on state, and we had to wait about 5 minutes for the battery to die before taking it off.