This past weekend saw another Weaponized Plastic competition held in New Hampshire. There were 14 entries (12 are shown below, an additional two showed up a bit late for the group photo). There are few things worse than Monday Morning Quarterbacking, but I was too busy yesterday, so here we go with Tuesday Morning Quarterbacking.


We ran a total of 26 matches to decide a winner by double elimination. The carnage was significantly more extensive than last year. Enjoy these shots of plastic getting shredded while you wait for us to drop the highlight reel:


In particular, the penultimate match between Drumnado1 and Vivian’s Vortex involved a massive hit in which both robots completely shed their weapons. With a double-elimination bracket in play, the previously undefeated Drumnado forced a rematch - after a 30 minute intermission to allow both robots to rebuild. You can catch a short clip of that hit on our new Instagram account.


The damage to Vivian’s Vortex was so extensive the robot had to be rebuilt with earlier prototype parts, which were not printed as durably as the final robot. They got shredded quite badly, but not before Vivian’s Vortex managed to crush the thin Lexan sheet that protects Drumnado’s wheels. This led one of the wheels to become inoperable, at which point Drumnado had to rely on the gyro force of the drum spinner to lift the robot and drive on the remaining working wheel.


I have a number of thoughts about our future events, but here are some of the big ones:

We originally intended to have matches run from 1PM to about 4PM, but ended up taking almost six hours to run the bracket! We are still trying to figure out how to keep a better schedule, without excessively eliminating robots due to time constraints when repairing.

We had a bunch of robots get stuck on the lower rail of the arena, I’m planning to fix that for next year with some adjustments to the arena.

Robots based on our tutorial did well in the competition. There are several lessons learned though:

  • The top side needs some sort of real retention of the weapon and bearing - a good hit can sometimes cause the weapon to tilt.
  • The weapon motor cables need better protection.
  • There is a bit of weight left, and all of it should be used to add more infill to the weapon.

We are also going to get the pit area closer to the arena next year - so that everyone is closer to the action!

-Fergs

Footnotes

  1. Yes, this robot went by “Issy” during much of the competition, but I think it more than earned the new name after the last match where it had to drive mostly in the air and on one wheel. ↩