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    11/21/04: I hooked up the sozbots esc last night and did a test on the weapon motor the drive motors, i'm very happy to be able to say that it was extremley successful. I've never had a speed controller that was so responsive and prescise. The calibration feature was also very useful. I really can't wait to put the blade back onto the motor and to get the wheel on it again. The only problem is that i have run out of good batteries so i have been looking around for some good batteries around 2-5 ah and i found some really great ones at Batteries America. There are some extremley cheap batteries here I am looking at the 2300 mah sanyo batteries that are for sale for $2.75 each. I believe it is a very nice price but it won't do much good cause i only need a few and the shipping cost will jack the price up way to much (about $7.00 extra) I just thought i'd share that link with you incase anyone is thinking about buying some good priced bateries :) I just assume buying them at my local hobby shop though, since I just need 5. I am not sure whether I am going to use NIMH or NICAD batteries yet either. I am going to make this battery pack by myself unlike most of the packs i have. This weapon blade (see picture) I made myself and I plan to make a few more for backup, it is really good and the motor goes so well with it too, there is a picture below were it tore some holes in a campbell's soup can last time we tested the robot with the old speed controller. I plan to get the wires situated a little better, put an indicator light on it, put a power switch on it, and get some armor around the wheels and the sides of it whenever I get some more money to continue building.

    07/20/04: Micro-wedge's previous design plans are trash, we have successfully been able to turn it into an awesome under cutter with a mean homemade blade with 4 hours of work into it. We just got a new sozbots speed controller for use in it, it is the brand new dual MX series controller. Our only concern is how to make it work, it seems to be a lot different than the other speed controllers and we are having trouble getting the left motor to work. If anyone can help us out with that please e-mail me at Probotbuilder@aol.com. Mini-doom is going to have a big change as well and may not be ready for the next competition we are planning to go to. I am going to change the straight shaft junk and set up a very small gear system just enough to get the blade away from the motor so I can put a titanium shaft through the front of the frame and to the blade. The idea of this is to prevent shaft damage, which was causing a lot of problems during the last few test drives. Chipper's future has also been determined, hopefully this will work out, it is my last resort. I realized chipper's drive motors are huge and too big to allow me to put an active weapon on it, so I am making it a wedge. I didn't want to do this, and I started out building combat bots saying that I never would do it, but I really am eager to get back into the bigger classes and having those big motors make a great scenario for a push bot. The drive motors I have should be able to push up to around 300 pounds, making them ideal for use in a middleweight pushbot, even though I have just two of them I know they will give good power. I am going to have to use Victor 883's in this middleweight, I do need to use a speed controller just a slight larger for a pushbot, but I reckon these can handle it. I am wanting to go to a competition during early September, the only competitions I am currently considering are RCRA2, and Atlanta Robot Battle, however, we may not get a chance to go to either. I will put up some pictures of the bots soon.

    03/12/04: Lately I have been working on a design for a rebuild of micro-wedge, basically if this works out, I am going to delete the micro-wedge name from the builders database and use a new bot name for this new one. There is a picture of it below this paragraph. There really isn't much detail because I haven't put the wheels, motors, batteries, or speed controller into the design, but the main reason I made the design was to get a good idea of what the weapon was going to look like. I am not real concentrated on the drive system right now, but I know that we have decided to use the mini-motors that the robot marketplace sells. Most of the armor is aluminum, in fact the side rails that you can see are actually part of the frame and are the armor for the sides. The aluminum angle bar only extends 3/4" on each side, so the mini-motors were really our only possible choice for a drive motor since all the other well priced ones were to big. I believe that this one will turn out to be an antweight, but if we can, I will weight down the drum and put a hacker brushless into it and make it a beetleweight, then there will be some serious destruction!

    03/05/04: I have got the event report posted but, for a short while I am going to just be taking a break from building. However, I am still going to be designing the new design for micro-wedge. We will probably change the name. We are not very sure on what the new improvements will be yet, but we are anticipating to change the drive motors to copals so that it can cut down on weight.

    02/25/04: I will have an event report up soon, but until then, here is a little idea of how things went. We lost all of our fights but most of the problems were inexperience and just plain stupidity related. I let my brother do the driving with micro-wedge but he hadn't gotten any drive time at all with the bot and he wasn't very smart as to were to hit his opponent. My excuse for the losses is that I forgot to tighten a few screws and I got a very bad draw. When I get the event report gets posted you will be able to see it here.

Old News

    02/14/04: At about 2:30 PM today we tested the robot out with a drive test, and for once it actually worked perfect!  Unfortunately though the pin in the EV Warrior broke and I am now trying to find a pin that will fit the shaft.

    02/10/04: We finally were able to get Mini-Doom's blade spinning but it won't be fully operational until tomorrow evening when I install the rest of the electronics and bend the blade a bit so that it won't hit the ground. Here is a picture of the weapon system, the pic isn't very good quality but you can get a good idea of what it looks like:

    02/09/04: Mini-Doom is still awaiting it's first weapon test and with only 1 1/2 weeks remaining we are tying our best to build fast. hopefully the lawnmower blade won't hit the base plate anymore.