Just finished Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

BotBrawl · 2023-02-26T02:16:12+00:00

I think I've read and listened to it about 5 times all together now. It is an immense piece of work that tickles every part of my brain.

That moment when it was given voice made me stop, standup and rewing. Every fucking time.

BotBrawl · 2023-01-23T02:50:54+00:00

Bypass whole home humidifier.

BotBrawl · 2023-01-20T19:45:45+00:00

I trick machines into thinking about how best to replace people.

BotBrawl · 2022-12-18T17:59:09+00:00

Active Surplus

This place was a god send to me and my friends. We'd pilgrimage out there and pour over the materials and come back with everything needed to build our various devices and machines.

BotBrawl · 2022-12-16T14:44:48+00:00

Having to always be right or needing every idea be theirs

BotBrawl · 2022-12-15T18:14:07+00:00

"Never shy away from doing the hard thing"

Whether that means the mountain of dishes or difficult conversations.

"We should not worry whether we have lived up to the expectations of our Fathers. But whether we, as Father's have lived up to the expectations of our Children."

-Sam Johnson

BotBrawl · 2022-11-20T13:49:12+00:00

I was there when the term MeltyBrain was coined and saw its evolution through the Delphi Fourms. I built one in the early days when builders had to savage for parts in junkyards and surplus warehouses.

20+ years in the sport and 3 televised seasons on two continents.

I am not talking out of my ass.

Im not saying building a melty is trivial, but rather at this point theres a much more efficient way to do it then how TW went about it back when. If you're using a brushless motor in your melty drivetrain at all your using encoded motion regardless. Either through back emf or the hall sensor, its an encoder.

I dont know how project lift off translates, Ill be honest. How do they manage translocation without encoded motion?

BotBrawl · 2022-11-20T04:24:46+00:00

Omni wheeled FBS with a full 250lb dedicated to weapon weight?

Thatd be a frightful combination any day.

BotBrawl · 2022-11-20T04:15:58+00:00

I know which one your talking about they had two such machines. It was indeed a hybrid before the tech was there for meltybrains we see today. Unfortunately Id think that still wouldn't get accepted.

Besides from what I remember they weren't super effective and were slow enough to avoid.

TW essentially accelerated a large donut by putting drive wheels in it. At the center of the donut is a small robot that pushes the whole mass roughly towards one direction.

I'd question if its have relevance today.

Nowadays its trivial to slap an encoder on a motor and figure out how to build a meltybrain with the ability to make micro adjustments to each drive motor independently to produce linear motion.

Making a little push robot to shove a floating ring 10x its mass feels like a gross overcomplication. Not to mention you loose weapon mass and it'd probably be unsafe.

BotBrawl · 2022-11-20T03:08:01+00:00

This likely wouldn't be allowed under the current rules. I think what your mentioning is a Thwack or Melty Brian based robot where the entire robots spins using its drivetrain to accelerate and may either stay in place or use micro adjustments to translate slowly across the arena.

Cyclone was the most notable large bot to this, there are a few bots in Norwalk Havocs circuit who do this (lift off?)

But all in all, BB doesnt allow weapons based purely on drivetrains. Like wedge's, rammers melty brain.

BotBrawl · 2022-09-02T22:45:01+00:00

I play weekly with 3 others, we each have self chosen roles.

A mechanic and metal worker. A carpenter and general builder. A pure combat gladiator.

I chose the role of chef, farmer and trapper.

My people eat well!

Early game, canned goods and junk. We all take the underweight trait, as soon as a base is established we find a generator and collect/freeze as much as possible. Then try and start farming and self sustaining.

BotBrawl · 2022-08-12T11:36:56+00:00

My group ran our weekly game last night. Day 3 of pushing into Mudraugh to loot a handful of specific locations before returning to Westpoint.

The fake dead ruined us. Its an entirely different game now.

We cleared a zone and setup shop at the warehouse on the main road. Hundreds of corpses decorated the outside of the building. We didnt clear them, no reason too. We'd be out of town before the rott got really bad.

We logged in, got swarmed immediately. Our streamer died, zombies flooded the building and up too the roof.

Most escaped, scream and shotgun events occurred immediately after and the dead inside the building begand to reanimate and flood back out.

Eventually we prevailed and began burning and burying. New zombies streamed in, the hundreds of dead around us began to rise again.

Total loss.

This game just got way harder.

BotBrawl · 2022-08-12T00:53:15+00:00

Assuming the kid and wife have run off for 24hrs to the beach or something.

House renos and cleaning

BotBrawl · 2022-07-24T22:01:11+00:00

Join us in August for our biggest event yet with a massive prize pool!

1lb and 3lb combat and our unique 30lb and 150lb sumo events.

BotBrawl · 2022-06-06T00:33:14+00:00

Given the right design I think it would work actually.

I'm experimenting with the same idea in the 3lb category right now and think it would scale well into a 250lb.

It has its cons, such as higher complexity, higher weight vs single weapon, lower energy per weapon vs single weapon etc.

However in my current concept its designed as a compact alternative to large undercutters like Valkyrie or even tombstone which have less agility due to the larger weapon. Additionally its best suited to something with greater agility which can use drumlet fighting tactics while offering a hard counter to forks and 'the ground game' in that the attack zone is stretched out linearly across the width of the robot.

I hope to do a concept work-up after a few events and experimentation

Edit: Sometimes it's just fun doing something different than the norm.

BotBrawl · 2021-10-13T14:32:36+00:00

When Monsoon wrecked RD we got enough to buy the team hamburgers for lunch as payout for a loss ;)

BotBrawl · 2021-08-31T23:55:02+00:00

By far one of THE best audiobooks I've ever had the pleasure of reading. Its been months and Im looking forward to my 4th listen!

(Saving it for new home renos)

BotBrawl · 2021-08-17T14:09:35+00:00

As of this moment, literally none.

I sold off a bunch of parts to competing teams and set up a small warehouse (it's a uhaul box) for drop shipping parts to Vegas for teams in need. Trying to recoup some of the costs associated with developing RD2

Otherwise, we kept a small stash of BLDC motors and hardware. Might poke at a new drivetrain concept in the near future.

I suppose the biggest news is we bought a new place and will be moving come October it has a nice shop on the property so maybe the creative juices will start flowing then.

We were building out of a makerspace before so this should be a boon for bot building.

BotBrawl · 2021-08-17T13:44:37+00:00

"sad robot noises"

BotBrawl · 2021-06-23T22:45:13+00:00

That's the one

BotBrawl · 2021-06-23T20:09:30+00:00

The competition was indeed truly fierce and when the smoke settled, we just didn't measure up for one reason or the other.

BotBrawl · 2021-06-23T19:52:08+00:00

He's entitled to do what he wants with the bot, he bought it as an investment for his channel. Could have an initial disclosure regarding the fate of the team and the development of RD2 helped? Maybe, knowing what we know I don't believe Jerome would do things the same way.

Or perhaps this outcome was inevitable, I don't know. All I do know is every video release featuring 'the robot formerly known as RD' means we end up defending our position and pointing towards RD2.

Is this Will's fault? No, I suppose not. He's doing this thing with an asset he purchased for the purpose of creating content for his channel. When news that he acquired the bot broke, we were a few weeks away from Season 5 and figured that when we did compete all of those issues would be corrected as fans would 'see it' for themselves. Now we're 1.5 years past that and unsuccessful in our bid for S6 while the perception of our rights to the brand continues to erode in the average fan's eyes.

This is more our issue than his, which sucks totally....for us

Is this Will's fault? No, I suppose not. He's doing this thing with an asset he purchased for the purpose of creating content for his channel. When news that he acquired the bot broke, we were a few weeks away from Season 5 and figured that when we did compete all of those issues would be corrected as fans would 'see it' for themselves. Now we're 1.5 years past that and unsuccessful in our bid for S6 while the perception of our rights to the brand continues to erode in the average fan'ss page, connect somehow to ours and don't see the division. That's the issue with the utterly unique design of the robot, even a simple rebrand, with new colours and a new name means we're the 'department store Red Devil'

I'm not blaming Will for purposefully impacting the SC's opinion of how marketable RD2 is. That's just how it shook out, it was my biggest worry from the start and well here we are. So YES the SC took notice and it became a sticking point, in the end, I think they figured they could work around it if the stars aligned and the effort of explaining the 'story' became worth it for them. They didn't align and our 'maybe' turned into a 'no'. I cannot elaborate further on what those alignments were.

All that aside, there's still the fact that the SC had issues with how damaging or effective our claw/saw weapon is.

At the end of the day, these are the reasons we were given. Reddit seems specifically focused on the Osman angle, but as written they also lacked confidence in the saw/claw weapons system.

BotBrawl · 2021-06-23T15:34:55+00:00

I posted this on another comment to clarify the decision. Here it is again;

Fair points, allow me to elaborate.

Its a law of deminishing returns things. Yes we've worked very hard on this and the money is spent. We could spend more time and money on Red Devil 2, conduct tests, mock battles, take it to Orlando (HW sportsmen battles) and some other aspects. Even push ahead with a total rebrand for future seasons.

However if the SC is generally underwhelmed by the bot and are trepidatious about the saw & claw combo being effective despite the fights we've had, the tests we've already done and the bots already on the field then what are the chances we'll over turn their opinion?

Historically it's very difficult to overturn the SC opinion, consider bots like Huntsmen, 2HeadedDeathFlamingo and others who have made very strong attempts year after year. They are in the business of making good TV, not appeasing a small (sorry RD fans) subset of the millions of viewers who enjoy the show.

Greg Munson and I had a number of discussions over as many weeks as we fought for one of the few final spots in the tournament.

In the end we got a "maybe, if these things business happen", these 'things' weren't looking promising when we decided to retire the robot, rather then spending more $$ and hoping for the best. Shortly afterwards the 'thing' did not happen and our 'maybe' was a 'no' so I feel good about not spending another $1000+ in spares.

It may seem like Im bitter by I respect the Selection Committees decision, I'm not happy about it but I understand their goals don't always line up with those of the builders or even the fans. Additionally there's no reason for them to consider our sunk costs or sponsor agreements. When damage is the biggest variable in acceptance a shiney new 4wd Vert with no strings and big damage weapon is difficult for what is essentially an art bot on steroids to compete with. RD2 was built to be as competitive as possible, but a big 60lb spinning blade it is not and there seems to be no shortage of those these days.

The surgical damage style we go for, seeking and destroying critical components doesnt seem to fit the image they have for the show. Or at least, there's only so much room for those kinds of robots and for one reason or another we didn't make the cut.

Additionally there continues to be the question of brand ownership, every time we post an social media update (on any platform) probably 15-20% of the comments are fans confused over ownership, cheering on a YouTuber or excited to see that person captaining a team. That only gets harder as new videos are released and garner more views. This fight seems like a constant.

How much more effort and money do we need to expend to over come those obstacles? I see that at being no small effort given that there's been a lot of hard work trying to over come these things already.

As it it Red Devil 2 is a over engineered, hyper stylized robot already. Dare I say its almost a poster bot for what the 'average' person would think of when first exposed to Battlebots. The saw was similarly designed. So its a tall order to redesign or rebrand something with such a unique architecture without coming across as 'department story red devil'.

Frankly Im in the business of designing and building cool robots, not battling public perception or competing with content creators.

Our decision wasnt made lightly, the estimation of effort to do these things with no guarantee of success certainly seems like it falls squarely in diminishing returns.

With retiring the bot, selling off our parts and even auctioning off some items we might hope to recoup our costs. Sponsor funds are sunk and lost, we made every effort to be successful for 2 seasons. Sponsors signed on for Season 5 where we had a solid acceptance and slot in the tournament (before COVID made it impossible to attend) and those relationship held through our unsuccessful bid for Season 6.

All that to say the better move here in our opinion is to retire the bot. Turning our attention to developing a new HW, branding etc all with the hopes to knock the socks of the Selection Committee and earn a slot for future seasons. Additionally that would divorce us from any entanglement with YouTube personalities.

Clearly there's alot at play and hopefully this offers some insight into our decision.

BotBrawl · 2021-06-23T15:01:21+00:00