As seen at Mech Warfare 2019, the existing gearbox motor shroud isn’t really up to the task of supporting the weight of a 20lb robot. While I work on a more comprehensive redesign, I’ve got a short term fix in the form of another 3D print. This is just a simple reinforcing ring, printed at 3mm thick, with the layer lines oriented so that layer separation will not be the primary failure mode. It is attached to the outer housing via a thin layer of epoxy.
After a concerted push, I managed to get Super Mega Microbot “Junior” walking, for all of 15 minutes, then packed it up and went off to compete in Maker Faire. Needless to say, with that much testing, I wasn’t expecting stellar results, and I wasn’t disappointed. However, I did learn a lot. Here’s some of the things that went wrong:
For this new revision of SMMB, I updated the gimbal board to use RS485 and support the 5S system voltage. I tested it some, but apparently not enough. While I observed no problems during Thursday or Friday’s testing at the site, during the first Saturday match, after firing the gun a few times, the gimbal went into a fault state and stopped applying power. The control scheme for SMMB relies on the turret being operational, so this not only made it impossible to aim, but also made it nearly impossible to drive.
Well, Mech Warfare at Maker Faire 2019 has come and gone. Maker Faire was a really awe inspiring event, and RTeam did an excellent job organizing the Mech Warfare competition. There were something like 13 teams with moderately functioning mechs who competed across the 3 days.
My entry, Super Mega Microbot Junior, did manage to walk a bit in 3 matches, but had a previously unseen failure in the turret system that rendered it inoperable a short while into each match. At the end of the 3rd match, one of the leg joints sheared off, and some other of the 3D printed parts were about to fail as well, so I declared it unrepairable at that point.
Alert! I’m at Maker Faire Bay Area all weekend in the Mech Warfare area in Zone 2 (May 17-19, 2019 for you time travelers from the future). Drop by and say hi!
If you were left in suspense last time, yes, the robot can walk! Getting it to do so in a minimal way was relatively painless. What I found, which hadn’t happened in earlier iterations, is that many types of dynamic motions would cause the lower leg belts to jump a tooth. Needless to say, this was nearly universally fatal, as there is no direct position sensing of the lower leg. This robot is heavy enough that my simulacrum 3d-printed timing belt pulleys just don’t cut it.
As mentioned last time, I needed to build a lot of gearboxes and new leg assemblies in a very short amount of time. So, I got to work.
I made a new fixture for holding stators to be extracted:
Stock in the vise
Countersinks milled
Stator mounted and fractionally machined
I turned down 8 more internal gears. To begin with, my mandrel had warped enough from the first gears that I had to add some heat set inserts to hold a cap to keep the gears on. Then on the last 2 gears, I got greedy, went too fast, and my lathe mandrel melted entirely.
Now that I could stand up and sit down, I needed to be able to walk reliably for the length of a match. This wasn’t going to be easy because the direct drive motors were always a bit marginal in their power output to support the full robot, so I had my work cut out for me.
The short story is, I tried many things, spent about a day examining high speed video of walking, and made some improvements:
Before SMMB could function in the Mech Warfare event it needed to be able to start and stop unattended. That meant standing up and sitting down on its own. Being that hack that this was, I went for a two pronged approach.
The direct direct servos I have for the upper and lower legs are somewhat underpowered for this size of robot. Especially so when the machine is fully squatting down. Also, the servos aren’t really encapsulated at all, and there are plenty of leg configurations that can self-intersect resulting in robot harm.
Next up in Super Mega Microbot 2’s existence is being able to run untethered. Before that can happen, I need to be able to plug in a battery, and hopefully not have everything explode. As seen with the IMU junction board, even minor inductive links can result in chips getting toasted. I had thought that just adding sufficient capacitance to each of the point-of-load converters would resolve the issue, but in fact that almost made it worse.
With the turret functioning in isolation, now I needed to mount it on the robot and get things communicating.
Mounting was easy, I 3d printed a bracket that fits the turret on one side, and mounts to the 4 hard mounts on the top of the gearbox chassis.
Turret mounted on chassis
More time consuming was updating the control software to communicate with it. The old turret used the HerkuleX protocol, and when I integrated the moteus RS485 based servos, I took a few shortcuts that I knew would need to be resolved later. And the future is now!
With the new gearbox based mech chassis for Super Mega Microbot 2, the old gimbal controller would need some updates. It has these new features/capabilities:
PCB rendering
