IPSWICH ECO FUN DAY

CHERTESY SCHOOL FETE - 9th June 2001

We had been invited by Mike Franklin of Dantomkia to attend a school event in Chertsey - Surrey. This was an area I knew well, having spent 3 years at University at Royal Holloway, just down the road in Egham. I have to say a big thank you to Jamie (my other half's brother) and his girlfriend for accompanying me down with Storm. Jamie was one of the original group who put the prototype together, so he knew the robot as well as anyone.

Storm was in pieces when we loaded it into the car - having been going through some tests with our motor monitoring probes (feedback of motor temp, max temp etc). We spent what seemed like ages sitting in heavy traffic on the A12 and M25, but we got there in the end - and only 15 mins late too !

In the 'arena' (I use the term in the loosest possible sense - we did in fact have an area of the playground roped off) Dantomkia, Wolverine and M2 were playing about. M2 was not running, due to an unmentionable incident with 36v into their speed controller the wrong way around (don't ask!) - however they had their flipper working - and very well it was working too.

We sat Storm down and while the others were playing in the arena, we started to put Storm together as we had done at the Ipswich event a few weeks earlier. This actually went down very well (as it did in Ipswich) as people could see how the robot worked as we built it. Once together we did the standard safety checks and were ready to roll.

Storm was wheeled out into the arena and we set off around the playground. All was not well however, my personal feeling in the testing earlier was that Storm did not seem to be behaving itself - nothing serious, just seemed a bit twitchy at times.

In the arena, my worst nightmare happened - Storm went into runaway. To be honest I don't think anyone else noticed, Storm has been driving around slowly and I had kept close to the grass edge of the arena until I was happy things were well. When Storm stopped responding to the controls (it was just driving slowly forward of its own accord) I shut off the transmitter so the failsafes would cut in. Storm drifted into the grass and stopped - I ran over to pull out the link and shut it down.

We carried Storm onto some tyres in the corner of the arena and tried to work out what had gone wrong. On inspection we noticed that one of the battery cable ties had not been tightened and the batter had shunted forward cutting on the of sensor probe cables that runs to the left drive motor. This had caused a short onto the chassis with untold consequences, however it seems the most likely explanation for what happened to Storm.

With the problem solved we took Storm back out to the arena again. Jamie drove Storm around the arena at one end, whilst I went for a ride on Little Sister with Ian at the helm. Ian, I have one complaint, get rid of the sharp pyramid at the top of Little Sister - its nowhere near as comfortable as Bigger Brother.

Storm seemed to be behaving itself this time with Jamie - though he did manage to panic himself at one point and shut down the transmitter to failsafe the robot (at least we know the failsafes are reliable !). He was concerned that the motors seemed to be smelling a bit, but on closer inspection we realised that it was simply the new motor that had been fitted at Ipswich a few weeks before wearing itself in (the new temp probes showed that after a good drive around the motor was only at 40 degrees centigrade.

After that the heavens opened and we all headed for cover - not easy to manoeuvre a heavyweight robot rapidly under cover along with all he kids running around the playground also looking for cover. We sat inside and discussed life the universe and Mentorn before packing up and heading over to the pub. I don't know how long the other stayed - we didn't stop long as we had a long drive back to Ipswich but Ian had some thoughts on the interference problems we were having and we're going to get in contact with him to see if he can help us resolve them.

Also, my apologies for the lack of pictures - we took a camera hoping to get some good shots for the Evening Star, but because of the problems we had, we didn't really get a chance to take any pictures.

We will be running (hopefully) at the Newark event next weekend, so we'll take the cameras along and hopefully have some good shots to show.

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