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:

You may remember us from a website we used to run called Totalinsanity.net, if you're an old timer. It was a combat robotic site with a bunch of tutorials and such. We used to be really into combat robots. We competed at Robogames, and Matt competed at a few other events and even won in the 120 lbs class once. Things are different now though...

Battlebots is back! There is only one weightclass: 250 lbs. Last year we entered a concept but were sadly relegated to "alternate back ups" and didn't get invited, so we didn't build it. This blog is our story of getting back in the game for real, building a new bot, and trying to avoid "back up alternate" status for season 3.

It's been 8 years since we last competed. All the motors and electronics we used to use don't even exist anymore. So it's time to order some parts and test some things and see what we can make with these fancy future components.

We used to run brushed DC motors, but everything cool seems to be brushless these days. Can they be trusted? Are they reliable? We're looking to find out soon. First, enjoy some pictures. We'll be back soon once we figure out a test rig of some kind.

​-Adam