CONTENTS
home page
design
specifications
transmission
power
weapons
mistakes
the team
combat history
help us
future projects
gallery
contact us
postscript
links
Mistakes
Avoid our mistakes
- Costs will escalate even when using inexpensive materials such as aluminium.
- It will take longer than planned. You cannot set a deadline - it gets finished when it is finished.
- Set a deadline for next week and it might get finished next year.
- Watch the weight. It could weigh 30% more then expected. Do not rely on bathroom scales. They are designed to flatter the user and under-read shamelessly. Consider calibrating any weighing devices with known masses.
- Design underweight. Mass can be added later.
- Keep a tally of weights by recording everything on a spread sheet.
- Soldering heavy guage wires is difficult since the heat dissipates into the components and may damage them. We used a heavy-duty soldering iron and augmented the heat with a kitchen blowlamp (The sort used to de-whisker turkeys before you pop them into the oven). These blowlamps can produce a fine hot flame.
- Before the final construction, have the machine designed in its entirety. Space will be tight and new components might not fit.
- Do allow access for spanners in the final design - a minor mistake we made meant that we could not actually bolt it together. We were fortunate that we could weld the components together and make the sub-assembly stronger and lighter - but we were very lucky that time!
- Measure everything accurately! In our case a very simple error resulted in two expensive speed controllers blowing up because the heat sinks had been reduced in thickness by a few millimetres. Slightly too long transistor mounting screws caused a short circuit that blew several dozen power transistors. Of course the fuses all blew at once as more than 120 amps attempted to flow through the heat sinks!
- Keep your test track clean - The floor of our workshop had a fine deposit of metallic swarf that was picked up by the tyres and re-deposited inside the robot. This had the potential to do a lot of damage - we were very lucky not to lose more components this way as the fine tracks on printed circuit boards can easily be bridged by metal flakes. Also, iron filings will be attracted to the motor magnets and, if any motors are not sealed, then the metal swarf could cause arcing on the commutator.
- Practice pit procedures. A small screw lost in the innards of our machine put us out of the two events at Technogames for which we had been entered. (We were consequently pitted against the Tornado team in the 'sumo' event as a back-up robot. We were not optimised for this event but nevertheless put up a splendid fight.)
- Don't use a dot-com domain as the search engines seem to want megabucks to include your site in their listings which is making it difficult for Team-Joker as a non-profit site to get listed!
Next Chapter : The Team
Avoid our mistakes
- Costs will escalate even when using inexpensive materials such as aluminium.
- It will take longer than planned. You cannot set a deadline - it gets finished when it is finished.
- Set a deadline for next week and it might get finished next year.
- Watch the weight. It could weigh 30% more then expected. Do not rely on bathroom scales. They are designed to flatter the user and under-read shamelessly. Consider calibrating any weighing devices with known masses.
- Design underweight. Mass can be added later.
- Keep a tally of weights by recording everything on a spread sheet.
- Soldering heavy guage wires is difficult since the heat dissipates into the components and may damage them. We used a heavy-duty soldering iron and augmented the heat with a kitchen blowlamp (The sort used to de-whisker turkeys before you pop them into the oven). These blowlamps can produce a fine hot flame.
- Before the final construction, have the machine designed in its entirety. Space will be tight and new components might not fit.
- Do allow access for spanners in the final design - a minor mistake we made meant that we could not actually bolt it together. We were fortunate that we could weld the components together and make the sub-assembly stronger and lighter - but we were very lucky that time!
- Measure everything accurately! In our case a very simple error resulted in two expensive speed controllers blowing up because the heat sinks had been reduced in thickness by a few millimetres. Slightly too long transistor mounting screws caused a short circuit that blew several dozen power transistors. Of course the fuses all blew at once as more than 120 amps attempted to flow through the heat sinks!
- Keep your test track clean - The floor of our workshop had a fine deposit of metallic swarf that was picked up by the tyres and re-deposited inside the robot. This had the potential to do a lot of damage - we were very lucky not to lose more components this way as the fine tracks on printed circuit boards can easily be bridged by metal flakes. Also, iron filings will be attracted to the motor magnets and, if any motors are not sealed, then the metal swarf could cause arcing on the commutator.
- Practice pit procedures. A small screw lost in the innards of our machine put us out of the two events at Technogames for which we had been entered. (We were consequently pitted against the Tornado team in the 'sumo' event as a back-up robot. We were not optimised for this event but nevertheless put up a splendid fight.)
- Don't use a dot-com domain as the search engines seem to want megabucks to include your site in their listings which is making it difficult for Team-Joker as a non-profit site to get listed!
Next Chapter :
The Team