It seems like now is a good time to do a quick update on everything we’ve been doing for the last couple of months. We realize that we haven’t posted much at all lately, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t been working hard!
We have spent a lot of time working on creating some new antweight combat robots and have started to compete with them a little bit as well. If we’re being honest, the engineering challenge behind building an effective combat robot is a lot more difficult than we had expected.
There are so many little things that you don’t think about when you see a finished bot in front of you. You have to choose the right material for each part of the bot (steel vs. titanium vs. plastic, etc). Then, after you’ve made those choices you have to weigh all of the components to make sure you’re under the 1 lb limit. These little bots are a blast to work with but it can be frustrating to get them to function properly.
So yes… it is taking us a while to get the hang of combat robotics. We aren’t worried though – we’re still confident that we’ll start having some success in the battle box before too long.
We also spent a lot of time RC racing this fall. We participated in quite a few different events and have even started to win a couple. Not only are we improving our driving skills we are learning a LOT about how to get these cars to handle properly.
It’s easy to think that it’s just an RC car, all you have to do is show up at the track and drive. That’s not the case at all. This little cars are very intricate and it takes a lot of knowledge to get them set up properly so that they can turn a fast lap.
And that knowledge about car set ups should help us out quite a bit in the other project we’re working on…
The other project we’ve been working on this fall is creating an autonomous RC car. We have several ideas for how to do this and we’re working on a few different approaches. Who knows how this project will end up turning out, but we’re having a lot of fun with it!
So even though we’ve been pretty quiet this fall, we are still getting prepared for several events and we are learning more than we ever imagined! But we’ve also had our fair share of struggles – which has made it very difficult to post about our projects. With any luck, we’ll get our feet under us a little more this spring so we will have time to share all of our progress.
We can’t wait to see what 2024 brings!
