I just found out that the cincy robotics league is having a battle competition today starting at 1pm! At the Manufactory.
Did anyone else know about this?
Nancy
I knew in general they were getting something going, Hobbies wise, I had to start trimming somewhere. I did rc boats. Still have em. http://westernwarshipcombat.com/ Most active group in my format. I almost went to a few formational meetings, but, time, and the drive you know? (Chatted a bit email wise about sportsmanship, and competitions, and the problems when the rule sets are not clear If I recall). It’s an hour away and I did hit a deer on 275. Yup, I am superstitious about driving back from the Manufactory. Yup… bad for my truck.
Robotics wise, I think a non destructive competition might be less of a cost barrier. For the big guns format, a boat cost over a grand, and took most a year to build from scratch. Properly water proofed, the damage to the hulls skinned sections was designed to be easily repaired. One boat, years of use, The lower the barrier, the more people can join up. You trash a grand robot a month, well… that is pricey and likely will require a team.
Bigger question is, are people wanting to put together an entry??
I think I remember reading about it on Reddit. Seems really cool. I’m down with forming a Hive team if there’s interest.
I am all for the hive getting into combat robotics 
Well from what I could see, they didn’t look like expensive bots. They were from kits as far as I could tell, one or two were different, scratch built perhaps.?
I think most of the cost was in the controllers which were modern rc aircraft controls. The ‘kit’ bots themselves seem to to be mostly built with straight motors not even stepper motors. They were two wheeled with a motor on each will and a third motor powering the cutting blade.
One of the unique bots seems to be built out of an old 8 inch hard drive casing with a spinning helicopter like bar on top.
Another bot looked like it started with the kit bot but then instead of a spinning blade it had a spinning cylinder with bolts in it. I think its strategy was to knock or flip the other bots upside down so they couldn’t move. However this strategy seems to fail since most of the bots seemed to do okay upside down as well.
This is a program started at my old maker space in CA.
https://www.acemonstertoys.org/box-bots/
It is a pretty low cost setup since the bots are made from cardboard. The guy running it previously did the big bots, but stopped because it got expensive. The thought behind the box bots was if your bot got destroyed, it cost you around 5-10 dollars and 2 hours of time to build a replacement.
Cheaper bots might prevent people from getting too serious about it, which is a good thing.
That, and with a $50 entry point, people that are curious could get in without a huge financial investment.
I went to their launch meeting. They’re putting on a class to build a kit robot. I think the cost to go through them was like $350, or you could buy a kit on your own and come fight for like $150 (not to the manufactury, just kit cost). They hadn’t worked out entry fees for non-members yet. If anybody is interested I can get more info. They’re simple robots with lots of room to grow and add weaponry over time.
interested in more info pipitoneb, might as well throw any info you have out here for us hive members
Technically they aren’t really robots… more like rc cars. No programming or autonomous action in them… Still fun.
I've emailed the leader and will post his response.
Here's what I got back. The class gets you access to their machines as well, which are similar but more extensive than the Hive's. I'm not positive but they may charge for training on different machines.
Response:
Hi Brett, We are actually still in the process of figuring out the details of how this organization will be ran since we want it to operate separately from the manufactory. We are more than happy to provide space and a home for the arena and teach classes but the full potential of the league can't be reached with our staff's resources. If you or anyone else is interested in attending our round-table discussion dubbed, "Skull Sessions" on Feb 9th, the organization of the league is an ongoing topic and we are always looking for people to step up and get involved. So the answer to your question is: "We don't know and would appreciate ideas". Thank you
And the kit is called the Fingertech Viper. It's $150 to buy. We teach a class where its $300 for non members and $260 for members to weaponize and build it in a group setting. If you have enough Hive13 members interested then we'll talk about charging the member price, if you want to go that route.
Depending on motors and electronics needed I have quite a bit of 1/10 and 1/12 rc car esc s and motors both brushless and brushed. I also have some 3 and 4 channel remotes if that would keep costs down and it’s what’s allowed
Yeah, that’s a pretty vague response. Sounds like a staff member of the manufactory is running it at the moment, but they’re open to other approaches. They do charge people for classes before being allowed to use the various tools, not unlike our certification process. The class for $300 seems like a really odd setup, because it appears to avoid the training costs, but I’m not sure what they would do if you went up there and wanted to use the plasma CNC for example.
Since you don’t have to be a member to take classes, I suspect it’s a similar situation, you would be denied use of that tool. Maybe the instructor would run it for you? I think having somebody actually teach people to use it is a good idea for some of the more advanced tools, such as the plasma CNC. However, they require classes to do basic stuff, so I think without have taken anything up there you’d be forced to work with hand tools, or whatever you brought with you.
Further adding to the confusion, I see “Combat Robotics 101” at the bottom of their class page for $350 non members/$280 members. It claims no prerequistics, but I think you’d still find yourself in the delima above.
Finally, it doesn’t really seem to answer the question “Can anybody build a bot, and bring it?”
By chance do they have an open house day that the programed would be discussed. We could take a field trip or see if they would want to do a Tuesday talk?
They're on meetup under Cincinnati Robotics Legue, but the Feb 9 meeting he mentions is not on there. The Manufactory people will "host" this, but they're looking for volunteer leadership. They were quite clear that they wanted an open competition during the launch meeting, but clearly they have yet to figure that part out. They're looking at this as a revenue stream so it's not at all clear to me how that works. I emailed him through meetup but if there's interest I can get in touch more formally and see if he'll come down one Tuesday. The guy's name is Kyle Krieg
I was kinda excited until I read the manufactory's response. We are an awesome enough group we could start our own robotics competition without the need to support the manufactury, which is an obvious for profit business.