Dutch Robot Games 2001 - 22/23rd December
2001
Storm with steel armour and lifter in the pits |
December this year saw the Dutch
stage their first robot wars event ever. A group of 10 Uk teams headed
over to Holland (well its not that far!) from Harwich by coach to take part on
Friday 21st. Ed and his other half, Danie, headed over on the Wednesday
and spent a few days in Amsterdam - they were lucky really, their crossing on
the Wednesday was near flat calm, which is more than can be said for the roller coaster
ride which was the Friday crossing. The ferry was an hour and a half late
getting in because of the conditions !
Anyway, we all met up at the Hook
of Holland and headed up to Zwolle. We dropped the robots off at the
event, and Ed and Danie headed off to where they were staying (a local hotel
rather than the hostel everyone else was staying in). |
Saturday
Now this was the first time the
Dutch had run such an event, and you're always on a steep learning curve, particularly
with so many robots attending, it was therefore fairly inevitable that problems
were going to occur - which they did.
For this event we had swapped out
the hydraulics for a linear actuator powered lifter system. Our drive was
being run of a Vantec 47E and the lifter off a 38E (yeah, OTT i know!).
The lifter module is having the Vantec replaced with a 4QD controller for future
events ! This was the first time people had really seen the versatility of
Storm - having a true weapons bay in the center with plenty of space to fit
things in !
Our first fight was against Grim
Reaper - unfortunately we were both having rather serious interference problems
driving around the arena which ended up with us being declared the
winners. Poor old Grim Reaper were having greater problems than us, and in
the end the blew a fuse somewhere which kinda finished them off - still a win is
a win.
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A shot across the pit area
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Storm waiting patiently in the pits
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We were into the arena next with
Tornado (just putting on a show to keep the audience happy), now I'm beginning
to think that we are a jinx to Tornado as they broke down against us - and to be
fair we didn't do too well, I think all that coach transit had caused a gremlin
to get into Storm as well. Luckily our gremlin only involved about 2 mins
with an allen Key, Tornado ended up in bits before being put back together
again.
Our final fight of Saturday was
supposed to be against T2, we put the bots into the pen to drive into the arena
and plugged in the link. Storm went into hard reverse.... very odd, Storm
is usually impeccable behaved, so we as a team were fairly convinced the problem
wasn't with Storm. After much testing and sweeping of the airwaves with a
spectrum analyzer we realized that somewhere there was something pumping out
interference at a huge amplitude on our frequency, problem was, the Dutch guys
only had 4 frequencies available to them, and no dual conversion crystals that
we could use :o( so after much dashing about, we decided it would be easier to
give the fight to T2 anyway.
Sunday
First thing we decided to go into
the arena with T2, we had missed not having our fight the previous night, but
decided a tussle was required. Sam promised to go easy with the crusher if
he did get hold of us.... though that wasn't something that we intended to let
him do !
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Suddenly it dawned on us... we
didn't have to get under the sides of T2 which was proving awkward (though
not impossible)... all we had to do was pick him up by the lifter and do
whatever we wanted with him ! (See picture opposite). To be honest
we were kicking ourselves, before T2 managed to even get us onto their
scoop we had turned them over and dumped them in the corner of the arena -
but we'd said we'd let them go through the day before so we stuck by what
we'd said.
A good fight though, and a fun tussle ! |
Storm didn't really run
much more, nothing to do with problems with Storm - more to do with interference
coming back, lots of people were having problems with it. The 35Mhz sets
which some of the Dutch teams had, seemed to be spewing junk all over the 40Mhz
frequency :o(
| This pic on the left is a nice shot of
Storm - click on it for a larger pic. You can see the lifter system
that we mounted in the weapons bay for this event, as well as the drive
section to the rear of the robot. Storm was also clad in 3mm steel
for this event, we had loads of weight spare and thought we may as well
use it somewhere ! |
 |
We arrived back in the UK at about
8pm on Sunday evening, after having a great event. Our Dutch friends have
learned a lot about running these events, and know what to do next time.
There is just one thing I will say - their arena was FANTASTIC, the only problem
was, they had put tyres around the outside, so you couldn't use the side of the
arena to ram your opponent into.....
Storm behaved as well as could be
expected - the problems that stopped us running weren't our fault, and the robot
itself was great. I also have to say sorry to Sam for bending his crushing
arm on Stinger....... but we did fix it !
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