Robots Live Stoke 2023
So this was, personally, a big one for me. I had to miss Maidstone owing to the issues with Jibril following Grantham and I wasn't able to take Azriel with me as one of the receivers I had picked up burned out on me. Safe to say, this is one of those events I'd like to forget.

Tech check went fine, even used the free time before the event to make a link cover to try and prevent the links from being pulled out and added headweight to the axe for that punch. However, in its first fight as part of a clusterbot with Audacious, Jibril did the intro sequence and then... stopped. Axe worked but the drive? Nothing.

Looked over the robot back in the pits, drive is fine. Put it in for a whiteboard at the end of the first show. Powered on fine, tried to drive it forwards, it twiches and dies again. It ended up with the robot having to be left in the arena dead as the fight went on. You can imagine how... disappointed... I was.

Spent all of lunchtime working on the circuit board assuming that was the culprit, possibly a bad connection resulting in a brownout. Shane also questioned a loose motor mount so that was tightened up as well and put it in to a end of show melee. I was all pumped up for this - the event so far had been pretty tragic for me.

Put it in the arena, turn it on, try to drive forwards... nope. It failed again. Once again, it had to be left in the arena as the fight went on. By this point, Dave Weston, Theo and a couple of members of the RL crew had tried to help it but this thing was going nowhere. After the show, we tried it again in the arena and even put out feet on the rolling wheels to introduce rolling resistance but it was fine for that. In the arena though? Dies.

By this point, I was done with the day and I wasn't particularly in the mood with the weather. My apologies to those who I may have upset during trying to get the robot out of the pits.

Next day (today), got it out the car and set to work. The Roboclaw ESC I run in Jibril is tiny, a 2x30 affair which has been fine but not exactly ideal owing to the lack of physical space in the robot to mount the ESC. However, it does come with a USB port to look it over, rather like a car's ECU. Upon looking it over, it looks as if one or both of the CIM motors are overdrawing on the ESC upon anything but light acceleration, causing the overcurrent protection to kick in.

What I think has happened is that the smack from Implosion/HW battles and then possibly just the age of the CIMs in a overvolted state has caused them to expire. They are the same motors from 2019's Jibril so maybe this isn't as unexpected as it could have been but it still sucks. I have one spare CIM in storage so will be digging that out on Monday to replace at least one motor to see if it will play ball in time for Cheltenham.

That all being said, the axe motor is working fine and with the side arm changes, the question had to be asked about wherever the robot can now self right. Turns out that yes, it finally can but only with the axe in the fired position. In the non-fired position, the side rhombus things I put on aren't helping as much as I would like but adding some HDPE "horns" on the axe gearbox mount should help.