16th February 2004: Mk VI

After the damage sustained at Reading Robot club 2 Electra needed a rebuild. I decided to clean up the design by shortening the servo leads where possible, and putting the voltage regulator on a breadboard with a capacitor to make the output voltage more stable. The voltage regulator is now 6 volts instead of 5 volts, which should make Electra a little faster.

The flipper is now made of 0.8mm Aluminium and Carbon fibre, so it's a lot stiffer than before, and hopefully more able to lift larger robots.

Jumper pins have been added to the breadboard to form a super-lightweight on/off switch in order to comply with AWS 13 rules.

The arial lead has been threaded through Electra's body in an effort to improve reception, which has sometimes been a little intermittent.

Electra now easily fits in a four inch cube and weighs 146.2 grammes, which is a shame, as I was considering carbon fibre armour at the sides of the robot.

In September 2004 I replaced Electra's aluminium and carbon fibre flipper with a titanium one. This saved me 10 grammes so I added titanium sides as well.