Jigsaw (Joey's Antweight Project)

LONG OVERDUE UPDATE:

...well it's been a while since I posted on here about robots but my antweights, after a shaky start, do seem to have taken off quite a bit. The Data Fields, my provisionally named new ant 'Arcus' and the late Little Yellow Taxi all have their own stories to tell, which will be told in their own time...but for now, I shall speak only of Jigsaw...due to the topic being named Jigsaw...or something like that.

---

Jigsaw II: The Chronicles Of Constrained Time

After AWS29 I realised I had to fix a few things:

- the level of interference I was getting was very concerning and didn't have an immediate solution, but a change of speed controller (to one of Peter Waller's Option D boards - a saving of about 8g with a built in servo plug) necessitated a change of reciever as the Corona one I was using was incompatible with the new electronics, quite apart from the fact that the aerial was only held together by solder 8mm from the reicever body so a Futaba R114F was acquired from Dave Weston second hand.

- the battery pack had been short circuited (due to my own incompetence when wiring the robot) and although it was still reasonably safe weighed far too much, so some smaller 180mah batteries were bought from Micron Radio Control.

- most of all, the design and construction materials needed refining as the way the original robot was held together was less than optimal (lots and lots of tape) and the 1.5mm polypropylene armour did not bend cleanly and had too much flex.

Unfortunately during the time before the next event (Richmond Fighting Robot Club in September) college and football began to get in the way (along with an unexpected visit to Alton Towers) and most of my roboteering was spent working on Little Yellow Taxi, so this version of Jigsaw ended up being built out of 0.75mm plycarbonate and 0.5mm carbon fibre, and hastily taped together the night before the event. I have no pics of it at hand but there really wasn't a great deal to look at - a white, invertible wedge that contained no parts from the original Jigsaw at all - and it really wasn't very good, the reciever didn't get going properly so I had no opportunity to fight at Richmond, although I had a great experience nonetheless. Back to the proverbial drawing board it was then...

Jigsaw II's only event was the Richmond Fighting Robot Club on September 12th, 2009, in Richmond-upon-Thames in Surrey.

---

Jigsaw Puzzle

I had been somewhat pleased with the electronics in Jigsaw II - hastily taped together they might have been but while I had control over it, it seemed controllable and powerful - and as Little Yellow Taxi had worked very well, and I had in my possession a larger brushless motor and controller, the idea of making a larger version of it and dipping my toe into 'proper' antweight spinners appealed greatly to me, so I set about making this version. For the first time I actually made a proper chassis; a polypropylene baseplate (now owned by Andy Jackson) with 5mm HDPE glued to form the sides with enclosing polycarbonate and carbon fibre armour on top and at the rear wedge. The electronics were the same as in Jigsaw II, with the reciever aerial fed out and taped to the rear for better reception, and the other major change (weaponry aside) was to obtain some larger, better wheels, the 'bling' ones I'd acquired for Jigsaw II had had to be Blu-Tacked to the motor shafts as the holes were very worn and didn't grip properly! so some Pololu 32mm wheels were put on, which made invertibility easier and gave good grip.

Looking back I was very pleased with how it all turned out, except for two major issues:

- radio reception was still an issue - at this event I realised that Spektrum may be the only way to cure the problem for good, I was suffering from a broken transmitter antenna as well so my range was very poor and the robot frequently did its own thing.

- lack of time in which to finish it...this is always a problem I had wired everything up and basically done it all apart from fitting the motor for the weapon, so I packed the motor, some connectors and a sheet of Ti I planned to use for the weapon into a box, ready to go on at the event...only to leave the box in Pontefract, a fact I only realised somewhere between Banbury and Oxford.

Fuck.

So Jigsaw was toothless at the event, and inevitably winless - it was nonetheless a great experience as I got to meet several people I'd only ever seen on television, and even found myself sitting next to Dave Gamble and Ed Hoppitt at the Saturday evening Pizza Hut visit...and the experience of being right next to the arena while Bigger Brother and Barbaric Response are in there and throwing robots into the polycarbonate just inches away from you is just awesome, it honestly felt like the pinnacle of my inner Robot Wars fanboy's dreams.



Jigsaw Puzzle's only event was at the 19th Reading Robot Club that ran concurrently with Robots Live!'s show in the Rivermead Leisure Centre in Reading, Berkshire, on the 24th and 25th of October 2009.

---

Jigsaw IV

So here I was again, designing an entirely new machine. Fate and procrastination combined to prevent me building until a week before the event, but I had high hopes that I could finally get something reasonably respectable done.
Back in August I had ordered some HPXF flipper servos, which had lain unused for some time (and in fact one or the other of my rats had rendered one of them useless in the intervening time) but would make a very good weapon connected to the serv port on Peter Waller's speed controller. I had already decided to go to Spektrum, so I had half a chance of being able to drive the robot, I had some thicker 1.5mm polycarbonate lying around, and had taken delivery of some materials from Tom Wilkinson including an old project box lid, which was 1mm aluminium. It wasn't the strongest material in the world but very workable, and I could use smaller 0.5mm polycarbonate brackets to hold the two materials together...hmm...

Initially the decision to build a flipper was moe or less made for me; antweight axes, unless powered by motors, are about as useless as Matt le Tissier in a McDonald's with a 'buy one get one free' coupon, and after the botched soldering I'd done on the spinner speed controller, that was out as well (besides which, I really wanted to use the servo). That bascially left crushers or flippers, and I decided upon the latter; feeling there were too many rear hinged flippers in ants, and as I've always loved them (Cassius, Gravedigger, Firestorm and Gabriel are to blame for that ), the ultimate choice of a front hinged flipper was easy. Using brackets the construction went quite well, if slightly rushed; the choice of a video case hinge for a flipper pivot was serendiptious and worked well (Jigsaw IV always had the same hinge in it thrughout its life), and the resulting machine, although I only had the chance to test drive it once, was pleasantly controllable and powerful. The flipper linkage caused me a great deal of grief, with me working into the night before the event to get it working, but eventually a combination that worked was found and all was well.

I had wanted to try and make it look like a miniature Stiltskin (my featherweight design) but time and complexity prevented that so it ended up as a straight wedge.

When I got it into the arena, at AWS30...I am aware that this post has already become quite long winded and wanky, but the difference between this version and previous versions was immense: I was under control of the robot for the most part, I had a weapon that worked and worked well, I put up a fight against strong robots such as Stewie, I actually beat robots for the first time in combat - admittedly not the strongest opponents in the world (a well built walker that couldn't self right, and Dead Meat) and overall it just performed superbly after so many failures, to the point that I emerged into the night happier than I'd ever been before in robotics and made no changes at all to the design for the following event (Roaming Robots in Wigan).

Jigsaw IV served me admirably for quite some time, with minimal changes from one event to the next, and I began to feel less constrained by the need to keep repairing robots and took more pictures, talked to more people and generally had more fun at events. After Robots Live! in Snibston I put in some new Pololu HP gearmotors, and retrimmed the robot in red and green tape, and this modification elevated it from being a fairly average robot to one that could win things - much to my surprise I won the Speedway competition at the Reading Robot Club two events in a row, and for the second of those I was also the joint Football champion with Mantis (although a plant pot teamed with Mantis would probably also have won, heh). In winning the speedway it set a record time of 7.2 seconds for three laps around the track, and has been by far the most successful robot I've built - possibly the most successful front hinged flipper to compete in antweights. (If I'm wrong on those counts please correct me )

Pictures and details of Jigsaw IV can be found at s267.photobucket.com/albums/ii302/joeychevron/Jigsaw%20through%20the%20ages/ , with my unnecessary commentary on the pictures should that interest you

Jigsaw IV competed at:
Antweight World Series 30, Richmond-upon-Thames, Surrey, 14th November 2009
Roaming Robots Winter Tour Final (not the actual final, don't worry but it was there and in Dave Weston's miniature RR arena), Robin Park Arena, Wigan, Lancashire, 6th December 2009
Robots Live! static display and antweight exhibition, Snibston Discovery Park, Coalville, Leicestershire, 28th December 2009
Roaming Robots, Baaarnsleh Metrodome, Baaarnsleh, South Yorkshire, 13th and 14th February 2010
Robots Live!, Hermitage Leisure Centre, Whitwick, Leicestershire, 27th and 28th February 2009
Reading Robot Club 20, University of Reading Employees' Social Club, 20th March 2010
Reading Robot Club 21, University of Reading Employees' Social Club, 22nd May 2010

---

Stay tuned (or 'keep yow arse deyre' as they say in West Bromwich) for news on Jigsaw V...