King Buxton - Semi Final

Gauntlet

Now that's more like it. With perfect control we dived under the big ball. This fazed the house robot so much he drove straight into the middle pit. 26 seconds later were in the end zone and through !

It looked easy and was ! We could go all the way. There was just a little problem in the background.... that would soon be in the foreground. But on we go.

Skittles

We always disliked the non-power / fighting games and we didn't like the look of this at all. It was all too easy to get stuck on a brick or jammed under a house robot. To tell you the truth Id thought we'd gone out. 165 was a poor score.

It didn't help that Steve the driver thought we only needed 120 for some reason and didn't go for it until near the end. But we were though again, just. All our optimism from the last round had gone. Now we were happy with every round we completed.

Quarter Final - Arena

Roadblock. It doesn't look like a great bit of engineering but it works very well. We didn't think we'd have too much trouble though. But the problem we'd been hiding from the world was going to be our downfall.

Even in testing before RobotWars we had seen smoke coming from the motors. Just before the first program we had changed the speed controllers for much lower resistance ones. This meant that on full power the batteries were effectively connected straight too the motors, driving the 750W motors at more like double that !

Under stall the motors just got hotter and hotter. With Roadblock we could push him quite easily at first, but the already badly damaged motors just could not last.

Smoke / Fire / end of RobotWars for us.

Now next year......

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