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The name Lightning Strike ended up being appropriate for several reasons. First of all, we were only reminded the about the event a few days before it took place. Building the robot kept me (Dad) up late for a couple of evenings just trying to fit the darn thing into the size restrictions of the Mini-Sumo class. Of course, our original plan was to build a larger bot that would start in an upright position and jolt itself into a fighting position, but time constraints made us kick that idea.
Instead we settled on something simple so we'd at least have something to compete with. Therefore we constructed our Lego bot using two motors mounted under the RCX brick. We went with direct drive in order to keep the weight down, although it turns out that we were well under the 500g limit anyway. With the addition of a couple of stabilizers, some bump bars and a tail fin (to stop us from doing a wheelie and flipping on startup) we were all set. The result was a blazing fast and highly maneuverable bot that proved itself worthy of the name Lightning Strike when we were fastest in taking care of the wooden block in the seeding stage.
Unfortunately, our tail fin stuck out just a couple of millimeters too far and so we had to take corrective action. That led to our first mistake - we didn't realize that moving the tail fin actually raised the bot off the ground by about 1mm until we were facing Mini-Spat and just sat there spinning our wheels while Mini-Spat polished us off. Fortunately Mini-Spat's trainer, Kelly Small, was gracious enough to allow us to undo our modification so that we could actually compete in the subsequent round, only to discover that our second mistake was evidently caused by a lack of time to test our programming. Our RunAway() subroutine, which kicks in after the countdown and is intended to allow us to circle round the back of our opponent, worked so well that we not only ran away but we also left the ring and jumped off the table, only to explode into as many Lego pieces as you might imagine when Lightning Strike struck terra firma. See the pictures elsewhere on this website for a visual definition of "stiff upper lip".
We refined our programming somewhat to behave somewhat more appropriately in the next match against B2, but we were still learning. Apparently we had placed our light sensor too far back for our speed so that by the time we recognized that we had reached the line, it was too late for us to stop and back up and the momentum just carried us off off the ring.
Although by this time we were out of the competition, we were able to make some further adjustments to Lightning Strike so that we were able to prove to ourselves that perserverance can pay off. Lightning Strike did very well during some ad hoc matches against the other competitors and all in all both Angus and Dad had a great time joining in. Roll on the next competition - sometimes Lightning does Strike twice!
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