For this build report, we're going to take a little step back to Kilobots XXXVI, where I debuted my first ever full-combat robot, Grater Good. While it might not have done spectacularly, was horrendously unreliable, and mostly won due to flukes, it (or what's left of it) still has a special place in the team's repertoire as the first combat robot I built and fought with.

Grater Good came about thanks to the BattleBots reboot, like so many others I got much more involved with the community than I could have as a kid, and was excited to learn that there were competitions across the continent for rookies like myself where one could enter a thrown-together robot and fight to the death. One of the members of the robot fighting community, Ethan Wall (of King's Heath Colliders, a UK team), walked me through the basics of combat robot electrics and helped immensely with part selection. I decided initially on a fairy/UK ant, figuring that it would be the cheapest robot I could design, despite there not being any local competitions. Luckily for me, partway through Grater Good's construction, the Saskatoon Combat Robotics Club announced that they'd be adding a fairyweight class to their next Kilobots event. I'm fairly certain that makes Grater Good the first fairyweight designed for Kilobots!

For a first robot, it's always good to start simple. Every builder probably was given that advice at some point. So, naturally, I went with the simplest design you can do in robot combat: a two wheeled wedge. Originally, the plan was to have a top and bottom plate with support provided by trusses, as well as two options for side armor. For the final product, however, the truss system was dropped as were the alternate configurations. The anti-HS skirting did return for its reincarnation as The Grate Gatsby.

I already had some 120:1 Solarbotics GM7 Gearmotors kicking around, prizes from the Western Canadian Robot Games nearly ten years prior that I never wound up using. Coupled with foam R/C aircraft wheels I figured they'd be a great choice for a cheap two wheeled pushbot platform thanks to the great torque and low voltage requirements. I later used a different form factor of these same gearmotors on The Grate Gatsby.

Powering the machine would be a pair of series-wired Lectorn Pro 3.7v-180mAh 45C Li-Poly cells acquired from the local hobby store. Being single-cell packs they can easily be recharged via USB. This was my first experience with Fingertech Robotics' TinyESC, the two of which accounted for around half the machine's cost! Money well spent, in hindsight, but definitely a bit of sticker shock for someone not used to buying R/C parts. They're worth every penny. Trust me. Radio gear is a HK-TR6A reciever and HK-T6A transmitter, which I still use on my newer machines.

Finally, the frame of Grater Good was, as you might expect, an ordinary cheese grater purchased from Safeway for around twenty bucks. I figured thin steel wouldn't shatter like plastics might, and that it already was full of speed holes. The front plate was simply cut from one side of the cheese grater, with the rear segment being rolled around the end of the motors snugly. The idea was to keep the vulnerable wheels and motors tucked far back to the rear of the robot, so that frontal hits would have less chance to impact them.

Seeing as I had basically thrown out my original plan by this point, I settled on Gorilla glue as the primary means of keeping the machine together. Extra protection for the internals was provided in the form of a thin layer of packing foam layered underneath the metal cheese grater shell. Everything was secured with glue to this foam rather than the frame as a shock-absorbing measure. I can't say whether it was because of the foam, but Grater Good took no internal electrical damage from opponents during the course of the event.

Less effective or necessary was the rear "wheelie bar", conceived during a more optimistic time. The wheelie bar was intended to keep the robot planted during acceleration, but it turned out to be far too slow to require one, and was in the end just wasted weight. It also proved rather flimsy, bending and eventually breaking when it was employed as a makeshift pushing arm during one of its fights. It, along with the unessential external power LED, did not return for The Grate Gatsby.

Lacking a proper bottom plate, to keep all of the loose wiring attached I turned to the tried and true solution of the amateur repairman: duct tape. An extremely ugly solution, but it held up until the very end of the event. Care had to be taken in taping to prevent this already slow robot from dragging its center on the ground, thanks to the long bodies of the motors which made for poor ground clearance underneath. This issue prompted the switch to GM6 motors for The Grate Gatsby.

Although Grater Good was durable in combat, there were more than a few flaws with its construction. The very old GM7s I used both broke during the event (although their replacements were fine), meaning the old wheels (glued onto the gearbox shafts) had to be ripped off and reglued, along with motors. In these circumstances, the 24-hour cure time of Gorilla Glue proved unacceptable in the frantic 20 minute repair times allotted, meaning Grater Good had to fight several fights with motors secured only via tape. The full duct tape "underbelly" was a pain to work with, demanding the entire innards of the robot be torn apart just to power the machine on and off. Finally, the foam wheels proved utterly useless in terms of traction, meaning Grater Good was slow, and could barely push anything.

Grater Good was, in comparison to most fairies at Kilobots XXXVI, an inelegant, sloppy little machine. Plagued with first-time mistakes, unable to really do what it was designed to do, and a nightmare to keep running, I was amazed even at the time that it managed to win two fights, if only because it kept running while its opponents broke themselves. By the end of the event it couldn't drive at all, hence why it was sacrificed to Scary Thing during the beetleweight rumble and its frame gifted to Scary Thing's driver. Hard lessons were learned from this machine, but a full rebuild was necessary to bring it closer to par with the competition. Some things worked well enough to be carried into the next version (the motors and electrics, the stainless steel armor), while others were discarded (the wheels, Gorilla Glue). Grater Good might have been the ugly duckling of the first Kilobots fairy competition, but with a few more iterations, I might just make it a swan.