Hello all, been a little while!
Well I can safely say I am pretty happy with DHMIS, it suffered one motor failure but considering what it did to the other robot I'll allow it. It's been a bit of a terror dealing a good amount of damage, bouncing around a lot and the occasional detonating of other robots. Precisely what it is for! To be honest it is doing better in competitions than I thought, though does prefer Petes arena.
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/gDG7dtS.jpg)
The motor was fixed by simply dropping a spare in but I intend on doing a custom can for it at some point. And (Sorry Dave) one of the unfortunate opponents sporting a through and through from a full throttled bar:
Test Robot Please Ignore hasn't been doing as well as I normally hope, one event lead it to a cracked chassis showing the need for making that more robust. Overall it has been too bouncy in the arena due to the chassis flex allowing the disc to contact the floor on big hits, not a difficult fix but one I haven't had much time for, once I get it sorted though it should be back to staying put on hits and not dealing with a dodgy self right (something I am also thinking of a fix for).
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/ix6rMKM.jpg)
It does however still break robots pretty well!
Drunk roboting one night with Rory and THE Tom Brewster lead to these three lovable bots (and maybe a few hangovers):
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/gRs0qOe.jpg)
Pukka sports a jousting arm with LiPo hitting edge for added excitement. Doom bar with its bar of Doom (And falling off). And Toms ant... which does something.
I also got 3 (Keeping a fourth for another roboteer) odd amphibious 6wd robot things that once lived their lives as a kind of pay to drive attraction. We took one for a little walk around the town after the aforementioned drunk roboteers got snowed in. Here's one of them wanting to stop at the park while on the return leg of a ~1.5km round trip to the shop.
The 3d printing setup has taken a step up with the addition of a very lovely wanhao duplicator i3 v2.1, and an ikea desk (Big up the Micke range).
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/ZZiABzH.jpg)
A bondtech extruder that allows twice as much torque before jamming as a regular extruder awaits my older prusa to help bring it back to being a solid printer.
A space navigator has now joined my CAD efforts as it enables me to work faster, and I use them at work and would perpetually go to reach for one that wasn't there while I am at home! If you're serious about CAD I thoroughly recommend one, for one thing it's been saving my scrolling finger from a lot of pain.
And finally a sneak peak at some tests I've been working on, an ant axe with some serious power, the entire mechanism weighs ~40g and in these tests you can see the very spindly axe arm used to allow flex to dampen shock (and therefore the impact force) just while I work it out. With a solid arm and a couple of things ironed out that are seriously hampering the mechanism performance (but stemming from the fact it's a test rig) and this could actually be potent.
![Image](https://i.imgur.com/Y8lswxw.jpg)