Servo - August 2016

28 SERVO 08.2016

significantly. This made spinning up take much longer, and I’m fairly certain I never reached top speed the rest of the fight.

Once my blade finally got back up to speed, I managed to get a hit on his last wheel and take it off. I won the fight by knockout, and Gracious Pipefessionalism was awarded the “Most Destroyed” robot at the event.

With only five Featherweights entered, I had actually made it to the finals with a 2-1 record. In the finals, I was up against Triggo once again. Since in the previous fight Triggo had dominated me with our teeth “meshing,” I decided to alter the way I spun so we would instead collide “tooth-to-tooth.” To be perfectly honest, this was kind of a last ditch effort to try and win on a massive one hit KO, as I knew Triggo had the advantage if we meshed when we spun.

To my surprise, as we first hit one another, one of the teeth of his shell flew right off! As the fight progressed, I managed to knock the rest of his teeth off and put a few good dings in his shell. A few hits later with Triggo having some issues getting spun up again, O’Donnell tapped out, giving Glasgow Kiss the win! This was a huge accomplishment for Glasgow Kiss, and the fight couldn’t have gone any better.

Since Triggo had not lost until the finals and I was already in the loser’s bracket, I had to fight Triggo once again to win the competition. As we were getting ready for the second final, I felt fairly confident knowing that Triggo was in pretty bad shape, and I thought I had a real shot at winning the event.

As the fight began, we both began to spin up (still spinning tooth-to-tooth) and just before the first hit, I noticed that my blade was beginning to slow down. I began driving around the arena trying to get the blade to spin back up while trying to avoid Triggo, but to my dismay, he eventually caught one of my wheels, knocking it off.

I tapped out, fairly frustrated and confused as to why my blade would stop spinning. After a quick inspection, it was obvious that one of the connections between the weapon ESC and the weapon motor had become undone. I think as I spun up the blade, the current running through the wire managed to heat it up enough to make the connection loose, and since there was some tension in the wire, it popped out. While this was a frustrating way to lose, I was still happy with how Glasgow Kiss had performed, and I had some changes in mind that would make it far more competitive at Motorama.

The biggest issue I wanted to fix by Motorama was the drag-braking within the drive train. I had heard of some people flashing their ESCs to SimonK firmware which made their brushless drive setups drive very similarly to a traditional brushed drive arrangement, and I wanted to give it a go.

Admittedly, I am a complete novice when it comes to flashing ESCs, so I wanted to try and keep it as simple as possible. I found a fantastic tutorial on flashing Afro ESCs by Lucas Grell, and I was able to buy a flashing tool from HobbyKing specifically for the Afro ESCs (the Afro ESC USB Programming Tool).

I had previously used the Afro 30 amp ESCs in a quadcopter project, so I decided to try and flash some of them since I had a few lying around. I initially discovered a few issues trying to flash the ESCs as I was having trouble with the flashing software recognizing that I had an ESC hooked up to it through the programming tool. I tried disconnecting the power lead from the servo wire (which I found recommended on the Internet), which helped the software recognize that the ESC was actually connected to it.