So Kevin and I competed in Robogames this year with a 30lb robot named "Big Bloom."  The idea was, we would make a robot that would spin at a high speed and translate as it spun.  This would make our entire robot a spinning weapon, and seems like a neat idea if you could get it working.

To attempt this, we had some pretty neat stuff on the robot.  Since we needed a little more control over the electronics than the average battlebot, we needed a better wireless system.  So we ended up getting a bluetooth transciever for the robot, and interfacing it to my laptop.  From there we could have used the keyboard or mice to control the robot, but kevin thought it would be cool to use the WiiMote, so we used that.  On the robot, we had to interface the wireless through a controller, so we used an atmel 8bit microcontroller, which is pretty standard on most of our projects.  Everything worked pretty good, but we had some issues in actual fights.

The day of the competition, we had our first fight against a vertical-disk-weaponed robot named billy bob.  The frame I welded held up very well, but everytime we would take a big hit the bluetooth connection would die and we’d have to reset it.  Needless to say, we lost that fight, and the next fight that was against a wedge.  Overall, it was pretty fun, and I got a lot of welding experience.