Killer Max Version 2 Part II

Majority of the new chassis for the Killer Max ver 2 is finished. All the parts seems to fit as my design. However, I'm still unsure if the wheels in the front is in horizontal with the rear wheels. I plan to add shield surround my robot as well as a cannon just for a cooler looks.

The infrared sensor is installed and check with a camera for the blink light. I installed the sensor on the very front of my tank compare to others have installed in the middle of their robot.
All for motor is check and work fine. However, when i try to test it through the brain and the motor chip, i can hear a small engine sound but the wheels won't spin. I'm still wonder if it's the motor chip's problem or something else.

Saturday is the competition, which leaves only few days to fix the motor problem. I have finished majority of the programming code, what's left is to assign each of the 4 motors to the right part.

This is the 4th week, we almost finish building the robot and still working on the programming job. So far, my robot can move forward and backward as the program, it will also turnaround(move back for 2 second and then turn left) if the sensor reading is higher than 100.

Now my robot is facing two problems: first, the sensor is getting too far from the ground, it can hardly read the signal, the robot will keep moving forward and move out of the edge without stop or moving back, I need to consider to change the shape of the robot and move the sensor closer to the ground so it can read the signal better.

The other problem is that the robot moves way too slow, maybe it's just the battery running low; but I'm still considering to change another ratio of the gear wheel for the motors to make it move faster so that it won't be easily crushed by the other robot.

This is the third week of our robotic project, and we are almost done with building the robot. Everything goes ok so far.
We have our picaxe chip board with two motor chips; we have finished making the two motors, the battery pack (with 3 batteries, 1.5 volt for each one, 4.5V total) and the sensor(link with a 9V battery). After connecting the motor, sensor and the battery to the board, the sensor will allow the picaxe chip to send our program source code into the motor chip and makes the motor run as we program. Next thing we need to do is to fix and improve the program source code of the picaxe so that the robot would move as we expected.
Now we are trying to build the body of the robot: we have the a piece of wood plate, and we want to cut it in a suitable shape that can fix the robot. We must make sure it will be able to contain the board, motor and battery pack so that the whole system will work effectively. Also, we're thinking about what shape we should make, in order to make the body more solid and hard to be crushed, or what shape will make the robot lighter and move faster. All of these are the question we need to concern about right now.

Killer Max Version 2 Part I

For the first part of the alteration, I wish to change the chassis of the robot.

Prof Mason have suggest me that my tank tread can change so my tank can have more traction.
So I plan to change the design of the wheels. Instead having the ability to climb up opponent's robot, it will have more traction with the ground.
Also, one of my weakness with the vers 1 is the weight of the robot is too light and the additional weight is position on the top which will affect the center of the mass and leads to tilt over and fall to the side.
As for right now, the chassis will be alter so the front wheels and the back wheels can be horizontal. Also, I wish to add additional twin engine gear box to the front two wheels, so the tank will be four wheel drive.
The new gear box has been already assemble to the same gear ratio as the old one. However, they will have different motor engine, which I wish to test it out to see if it will affect the overall performance.

My biggest problem now is to fit both gear box on my chassis and still within the restricted size of the robot.

The Robot

Right now we are in the second part of making the robot.

We had finished build up the PicAXE dev board with two motor chips.
The serial cable connect to the input and output of the PicAXE, allow us to link to the computer and put our program into the PicAXE chip.
The dev board also contain voltage regulator that can regulate the voltage to 5V, prevent the PicAXE chip from brunout.

Each of the motor chips we set up has seven pins on it: pin 1 and pin 2 connect to the 2 output of the PicAXE; pin 4 and 5 connect to the motor; pin 3 goes to ground and pin 7 goes to the power.
When we connect the board with power and run our input program, the PicAXE will send signal to the motor chip, and control the motors to work as we want.

That's what we have done so far.

Please post your updates

Hi Folks,

Please post your status on the blog.

Have fun!

mmason