Drawing of a cute shark with a heart and trans symbol drawn on her chest. Tattoo style banner around her says 'older than the north star' and there are pink stars behind her.
More #art. A cute blåhaj with a #trans rights message in the pink notebook I only draw on with blue and pink, which is SO NEARLY FINISHED. (And then what do I do?)
Mostly controller issues, the game pad and hub take a beating as the teams scramble between the pits and quick turn around matches, so there are often intermittent connections.
Mechanically, it's misaligned chains, skipping gears and difficult-to-access loose screws.
Great match in the tele-op period by the red alliance too..too! They got some really long shots in.
Fantastic autonomous period performance by this team.
Full auto collection, aim, shoot and gate release.
Auto aiming!
This event's being live streamed, so you can follow along: www.youtube.com/live/1Hvn_XD...
They're doing practice matches now, the competition will start this afternoon.
Some pics of the robots
I'm at another First Tech Challenge robot event today. I'm helping in the Robot Hospital, fixing broken bots! Our hosts, American School in London, have provided an amazing stock of spare parts.
Been working on my Hacky Racers autonomous robot, been vibe coding with Claude. Experience has been very good so far, been able to improve my code and add lots of tests and enhancements including GUIs local/web for the robot, an app calibrating the camera to help with distortion at the edges.
Researchers from Prof. Joohyung Kim's KIMLAB at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) used #Teensy to develop a low-cost, easy-to-reproduce "pneumatic skin" that gives robots a sense of touch
www.pjrc.com/pneumatic-ro...
AMP has been kitting out for a build recently... this looks like an interesting project: mitxela.com/projects/scr...
🇬🇧 🇱🇹 🇳🇱 🇨🇿 🇱🇻 🇮🇹 🇦🇹 bbb.gd/events
🇪🇺🤖⚔️📅 March in European Robot Combat!
~
4th Combat Robotics NI 456g in Belfast 🇬🇧
5rd QRFL ants in London 🇬🇧
7th Bristol Uni ants in Bristol 🇬🇧
7th Klaipeda ant & 454g in Klaipeda 🇱🇹
8th Rock & Robots sportsman ants in London 🇬🇧
14th Robodojo sportsman feathers in York 🇬🇧
Ah, that explains it! The middle phase wire from my weapon has pulled out of the esc.
Ok, I know why my drive was bad at the end, one of the drive belts was slipping.
The weapon belt is still in place, so I don't know why the weapon stopped.
That was great! I think I took out the other big spinners in the first half chaos, but then I lost my weapon (belt snapped?), so then it was a sad hobbling match between me and Fig Roll. Rob had lost drive on one side (all the wheels had taken weapon hits)
I'm in a fun whiteboard fight soon, against Fig Roll ( @pinski1.bsky.social spring flipper, but the weapon is broken), Aesop (shell spinner), Stuffy (dual reaction walking spinner!) should be a fun fight.
Another fight, another loss by pinballing into the pit. I was probably winning this one, right up until I was out. Unfortunately the self-righting loop failed early on, so I was even more out of control than usual, flailing around trying to get back upright.
I'm out the comp, may get a whiteboard
My next (and possibly final) fight is against Tupperscare, a lifter.
That was a great fight! Konkushun tapped out fairly early on (cracked chassis). Paradigm Spin & Babrog had a great tussle for most of the rest of the match, with lots of pinballing & self righting. Ultimately I pinballed into the pit, but I'm very happy the bot worked perfectly for the whole match.
More pictures of my opponents:
The fight draw is out, my first match is against Babrog (excellent grab and lift bot) and Konkushun (spinning beater weapon?). Should be a good match.
Paradigm Spin may look very similar to last year, but a lot has changed. The 4-in-1 drone esc has been replaced with separate drive & weapon Escs, the Rx is electrically protected, link changed to an internal switch & the self righting mast has changed from ali & foam to 3D printed nylon & TPU.
Paradigm spin sat on the pit table, with locking bar fitted to make the spinner safe, next to the Bristol Bot builders Brawl event pit table label
I've passed tech check, ready to compete :-) 😁
The tourney bracket for today is at bbb.gd/fight and the spectator programme is at BBB.gd/prog
It's been a year since I've competed with Paradigm Spin, but I'm back in Bristol to fight again! I've never been happy with Paradigm's reliability, so I've been doing lots of testing and development. This clip is a montage of that, full vid on youtube: www.youtube.com/watch?v=AB8J...
Just some of the over 50 incredible robots coming to fight at BBB Beetle Brawl 2026! We will be streaming from 11am GMT on Saturday at bbb.gd/stream
First match of the final:
How cool is this! All done by school students.
They have code for auto-aiming based on odometry too!
It's robot season again! I'm volunteering at a First Tech Challenge event in Oxford today. New for this year: ball launchers!
Due to popular demand, here is a demonstration video of how to make 3D printed PCBs using just vector drawing software, a 3D printed (PETG filament for mine) and self-adhesive copper tape. Any questions, let me know!
I have encountered a little of this.
My brother historically has received more praise than I.
When I visit India it’s awkward for me.
The women talk in the kitchen about cooking while the men sit in the living room talking about global affairs.
There is no space to talk about me or science.
