RoboWars Returns – 14/01/2023 – Day 1
In December RoboWars announced a Sportsmen event to be held in Hamilton, Queensland. Below is a collection of photos and diary of the event from my fuzzy memory.
Fight 1: PotHead
Other than driving The Verdict for 30 seconds prior to leaving for the event a day before, I was going into this one blind. And it really showed. I’m super rusty with my driving, doing a lot of weaving instead of straight driving, spinning in circles from over shooting when turning (Really should have put some steering rates into the radio) and I noticed one side was a little bound up compared to the other (it pulled to one side when going forward).
There was a lot of dancing around as I tried to pin Pothead to the wall so I could wail on it with the hammer, but it was actually hard to push to the wall without it slipping off the front. Eventually I managed to get a few decent hits, mangling the pot easily.
Pothead’s saw was scratching the paint in the corners when we collided but did nothing more then that which was nice. However by the timer ran out, the judges has decided the winner was Pothead. It went the full three minutes and didn’t fail, so I consider that a good start to the event. Back in the pits, I just tightened all the nuts and bolts to ensure nothing was going to fall apart and then charged the battery, ready for the next match
Result: Loss by Judges Decision.
Watch the fight here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rsgc7zcOLUM
Fight 2: Raptor 
After the Pothead match, I dug into the menus of the radio and dialed in some rate limiting on the steering to try to reduce the twitchiness. Raptor is a full fat featherweight that swapped out their usually vertical discs for a pair of saw blades and wedges…… (I wasn’t expecting these since it was a sportsmen event, but the EO allowed it.)
There was a lot of back and forth, sparks and hammering through out the match, there was a moment where they actually wedged me up and onto the weapon, which missed the internals my a few millimeters. After that, as it was clear the wedgelets were not something I could defeat, I just focused on pushing against their weapon, trying to hammer, stall and push them where possible. For the last ~30 seconds, I just jammed the weapon down on them to clamped on (The APD speed controller did well here, the thermal/current limiting saving it.)
Sadly, the judges gave it to Raptor.
Once again, there was no real damage other then a slice into the tongue on the robot and some more scratched paint.
Result: Loss by Judges Decision.
Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cl5Bw53AW8Q
Unfortunately we are now out of the competition, so we can only compete in exhibition matches and melees.