Moulding Time

It’s been a while since we’ve posted any thing, but the team as not been idle.  Lots of stuff has been happening with the electronics, and our drive system.  We’ve also started making some moulds for our tires.  Including making a nice moulding box.

We are going to a folk festival

Yes you read the subject correctly, Blake robotics going to IVFDF at Sheffield University and we will be doing a workshop on the Saturday morning (24th Feb).  So if you like folk and combat robotics  (and we admit that’s one heck of a venn diagram), then come a join us.

A sense of balance

Those who watched the video of our weapons test, would have noticed the robot wobbled as the blade span up. This is because we had not balanced the blade, i.e. one half of the blade had more mass that the other half. This meant we had to balance the blade (add some weight to one… Read more »

Weapon test

We’ve been field testing our weapon.  This is the first time we’ve spun the blade up using the motors, all in all a successful test.  With only small tweaks needed to get it running nice and smoothly.  More videos to follow.

LED Board

We made a little LED driver board for doing our atmospheric lighting.  It’s got a little ATtiny on-board that handles all the effects like fade in and out.  We can control it over I2C from our Pi to change which effect it’s currently running.  If you want to check it out and make your own… Read more »

Pi motor control tutorial

We’ve added a tutorial on controlling a motor with a Raspberry Pi.   We hope some people find it interesting and useful.

What we’ve done this week

Lots of progress this week, we have placed a load of stuff in the frame to test everything fits (it does).  The first of our battery holders has been made, our drive speed controllers are now done (including a bunch of firmware modifications).  Our control system is now being tested and so far is working…. Read more »

It’s here

Today during my lunch I popped to the welders to pick up our now finished chassis.   Finally we have something to start connecting all the parts we already completed to.   The next few weeks will see a lot of visual progress now .

Ball transfer unit marinare

So here is a simple recipe if you wish to have lubricant free ball transfer units. That is point some roboteers will be be screaming “Why Why do you want lubricant free bearings, that’s the last thing you want, these people are idiots”, and while I accept we have had the odd genuine idiotic moment… Read more »

Smashy smashy

The team have all been waiting for the last week or two for our weapon bar to be cut, and at last it’s here.  We’ve had two cut which we have dubbed the fubar and artical 50.  The first name is what we hope it will do to other robots, and the second name relefects… Read more »

  • A bit about our robot

    So far we’ve not given out too many details about our robot, which makes us feel a little remiss.   In-order to rectify this we’ve written up some of the details we are happy to make public prior to filming.  Those of you interested in such thing might well find this interesting. https://blakerobotics.org.uk/the-robot/

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    Posted on 3rd February 2017 by
  • Statistics

    We’ve put together some statistics about the construction of our robot to date, that a limited number of people will find interesting and some might even find amusing. Stats Page

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    Posted on 30th January 2017 by
  • Motors motors motors

    All the motors for our robot have finally arrived.  Fellow builders looking at this post will be thinking that’s a lot of motors, that photo must include the spare motors.  Well the photo does not include the spares our design really does use this many motors !   Why we use this many motors we… Read more »

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    Posted on 16th January 2017 by
  • Milled parts

    The first parts we designed and sent to be milled have arrived, this created much excitement in the Blake robotics team.  These first parts are part of our weapon.

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    Posted on 10th January 2017 by
  • Frame building

    The last few days have been spent cutting and notching all the tubular steel we are using for the main frame of the robot.   There is a lot of tubing sections to prepare ready for welding.  Most of our first day was spent clearing space in the workshop for the new band saw and… Read more »

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    Posted on 2nd January 2017 by
  • Building over Christmas

    Christmas is nearly here and a number of toys have arrived ready for us to get some serious robot building done over the Christmas holiday.  We are planing on doing lots of the metal work needed for getting our chassis welded together in the new year.  We also have a fair bit of soldering todo,… Read more »

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    Posted on 23rd December 2016 by
  • More electronics news

    Our second board (the board that runs the speed controllers) is back from the board house as is the power regulation boards Ed designed.  Our first speed controller housing is also finished, and we are knocking up some removable links so we can do a test run of all our electronics together a some point… Read more »

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    Posted on 23rd December 2016 by
  • The second board

    The design for our second board which allows us to control our motors (amongst other things) is now done and with the board house, so we should have the new boards for Christmas.

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    Posted on 16th December 2016 by
  • Electronics

    We are designing a number of custom boards to run our robot, the first of which the interface to our radio modules was finished last week and sent to the board house for manufacturing.  Today that first set boards arrived in the post, so we now have a number of surface mount and through hole… Read more »

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    Posted on 9th December 2016 by
  • Where we are at

    We’ve now finalised the physical design of our robot, this means all CAD models are now complete.  Our electronics design is not fully completed yet however.  On the physical side of things team is now switching from design phase to production phase.  All our big components which we can’t manufacture ourselves, such as shapes cut… Read more »

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    Posted on 31st October 2016 by