Wow! What a fight! If you haven't seen it yet, then go see it!

SPOILERS AHEAD! You've been warned. Full battle damage report after the jump!

If you've been following Bots FC, then you know we like overhead hammer robots, and you probably know about our affinity for unique drive methods. But maybe you just heard about us from Battlebots and decided to come take a look. So let's dive into Shatter! and what makes it unique, and what change's we've made vs our previous HW robots Blue and Mega Melvin. More after the break. Click here!

We just got back from Battlebots 2019! What a journey! It's been a long 3 years in the making, but we finally made it to Battlebots, a real dream come true.

If you'd like to keep up with our day to day happenings, follow us on instagram and twitter where we post a lot more regularly!

We plan to have a lot of articles here about some of the things we've been trying: at Battlebots, at Motorama, at Maker Faire, etc. Things like ablative armor, mecanum wheels, gearboxes, five axis waterjetting, and more! We'll also be doing fight recaps for every episode we're in!

This space will be for long format, information dense posts. Instagram and twitter will be for short updates and fun photos and such.

​We can't wait until the episodes start airing: June 7 on Discovery!

In King of Bots episode 6 I accidentally recreated my favorite moment from Battlebots. Hit the break to find out what that is, and a fight recap from our episode 6 matchup against vertical spinner Two Barbecue!

It's been a couple weeks since an update, and I owe you an update of our first fights in China!

To start, a fun fact: these shows air live to an audience larger than any robot combat show ever before, and the full episodes posted online regularly rack up view counts higher than even the most viewed Battlebots clips of all time on youku. We're talking multiple millions. Wow! Hit up the break to watch our first fights and hear a post fight breakdown!

So, that's me and three new teammates in China. We're about to go into the arena for our first international televised HW robot fight. 10 million people will watch this. Yowza. You're probably wondering how I got here... let's rewind a bit after the jump.

Well it's almost the end of the year, so I should probably do an update about Robogames!​ When I last left off we had a pile of parts. As you can see above, we managed to put them all together! Let's talk about how after the break.

Oh... I've been bad with the updates. Don't worry though, we've got some cool stuff coming soon. We've completely updated the frame and have some sick custom mecanum wheels. Should be testing the new drive platform out within the week... Robogames is only a month away!

Building a brushless powered axe is a bit tricky, as is anything brushless at these scales.

This post is an update on how we're attempting to build the most insane axe robot ever, and we'll go over our progress from our slow axe at Maker Faire to our current axe, which is pretty scary. Hit the jump for videos and math!

We're going to talk a bit about practice, testing, and fun. Isn't fun the whole point of this hobby?

In the last post we talked about brushless vs brushed, modern vs old, etc. I'm going to cut right to the chase:

Castle 2028 Motors and Mamba XLX ESCs are the future of this sport for anything over 30 lbs. Heck, maybe even for a crazy 30. Go buy them:

Castle 2028 Motor
Castle Mamba XLX
​
This motor and controller combo can handle 7500 watt peak output for a few seconds. Pretty crazy. Ok, so let's backtrack a bit and get back to why these specifically are awesome. Originally I had intended to build a test platform and grab some numbers. Things like a torque/amperage graph, stall torque, that sort of stuff. Then a fun thing happened, my test platform lit on fire.

It wasn't the fault of anything other than some faulty capacitors. It happens. But that was kind of boring. I end up with a fire and I didn't even have a robot yet! Then I found an equation online I probably should have known about to begin with.

Kt * Kv = 1352
(torque is oz-in/a)

This is super useful! Because I know the Kv, this lets me figure out the torque of the Castle 2028 at whatever amperage I want. Super useful for figuring things out like "can this motor push my heavyweight?". This coincided with me finding out about a HW Sportsman Class competition in Florida (Battles at Maker Faire), about a month out.

​Could I build a robot in a month? Sounds difficult... but also fun. And isn't that the whole point of a hobby, to have fun? Read on for a high-level post about how we built and fought Mega Melvin in a month: