Here’s a short video of our minibot, Gearmµ (Get it, get it?) in action. This is minibot rev 6.1 for us and we’re going to bring at least three (maybe more) of these to world championships with us.
We will be letting other teams use our minibots as well, so if your team is interested just PM me or reply to this post. If you ARE interested in borrowing the minibot, I can give details on how it needs to be mounted as well. (We would like to see your deployment system due to the safety of our minibot)
Here it is: 700ms up a 7 foot pole and with the acceleration that this little guy has, 10 feet is under 1 second
Good luck to all teams out there!!
(if you look really closely at the left of the main action of the video, you can see the chassis of minibot rev 1)
That’s moderately insane and really pushing the theoretical limit of those motors. So that’s impressive. I’ll go out on a limb and guess that deployment is a pretty major challenge for that minibot, though. I have a feeling that it’s not tolerant of too much tweaking or misalignment when it’s being deployed.
This design is actually one of the easiest in terms of deployment because the magnets allow you to be a little off and if you do it right you do not need any moving parts to release it. The only complex part is putting it out there but thats the problem with every minibot deployment.
At SMR we were lucky enough to use one and it fit right on our deployment system. In one our matches we got to race it against them and we barely won. Our deployment was like a 1 second faster. It took them an hour to get it through inspections, but that thing is pretty trick!
I would like to thank Charlie for letting us Borrow one! Gotta get him a shirt =p
We have a similar minibot with a similar speed and it’s pretty easy to deploy. We have two .25" Nylon Stand offs on our deployment mechanism and two Aluminum tubes on our minibot with a .375" ID so there’s a total of .125" of room for the minibot to “find the pole”.
Solid design for the minibot and deployment. Shall be interesting to see how deployments vary since the minibot themselves will be (for the most part) evenly matched. I grinned at the mention of “rev 6” we have had similiar redesigns. Currently we are on rev 10.2 so hopefully this shall be the charm.
Good luck and see you in St. Louis
Out of curiosity, how do you get the “.18”? The big numbers for us are the major changes while the small numbers are the tiny little tweaks we make. Have you really changed one major revision 18 little times?
Yes, 18 times. I dont’ have my design notebook with me, so I can’t list what each revision entitles. But the version 6 concept is magnets with two seperate shafts. Many of the changes are small, and most don’t contribute to speed, but they do add durability and reliability. ALSO, they’re was a complete rebuild after version 6.12, but they’re wasn’t a concept change, so I include it as a version 6 model.
we have 10 very distinct designs that either have completely different materials or different frames/configurations… as of now we have at least 7 frames that are still reconginziable and then there are other designs that are just on paper. It has certainly been an adventure with all the different tweaks in the rules in the first few weeks. 6.18 is impressive I am looking forward to seeing your minibot in action. What are you using as a mounting plate/bracket? just wondering.
We have a similar minibot with a similar speed and it’s pretty easy to deploy. We have two .25" Nylon Stand offs on our deployment mechanism and two Aluminum tubes on our minibot with a .375" ID so there’s a total of .125" of room for the minibot to “find the pole”.
Our deployment is a swing out arm that hits the pole before the ten seconds. As long as some part of the arm makes contact with the pole, were good to go. At ten seconds, a servo releases the minibot and it shoots down the arm, hits the poll, and launches straight up. So basically the swing out arm gives our minibot 2.5-3’ of play
As for or minibot itself, were not releasing that until we’re at worlds…
