Everything that can go wrong…
A hobbyist creator with a degree from the University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Funkmaster says he wasn’t prepared for all the issues he’d run into when he started on the tight-deadline MASHBot construction. “I’ve learned so much during this… I didn’t know what I was getting into. Allan tried to warn me so many times. He was like ‘hardware is a bad idea!’”
The first model of MASHBot used polystyrene foam core to support the system. “It was pretty decent, but one problem we ran into was sagging,” Funkmaster said. “Foam’s not exactly the most sturdy thing.”
As if that wasn’t bad enough, Funkmaster says the motor lubricant he was using was eating through the foam supports. “That fell through in the most literal sense.”
After converting to a more resilient wood frame, Funkmaster also replaced the assembly’s original CD drive motors with more powerful and accurate NEMA17 stepper motors, as you might see in a 3D printer. Funkmaster also didn’t have a DS stylus handy when he started, so a filed-down LED had to fill in for a time.
Staring down the robot won’t help… Kyle Orland
Though Funkmaster says MASHBot worked perfectly during home testing in Ontario, when he got it down to Rockville, Maryland, for the AGDQ event, he quickly found that “I plugged it into the wall and it wouldn’t even boot. I had to do some very makeshift solutions, some I feel very awkward and almost regrettable that I’ve done, but it worked.”
Through additional testing over the marathon week, Funkmaster found himself in a bit of a Catch-22 situation regarding the sensitive cork, spring, and metal assembly used to actually push the stylus onto the screen. With each test, the actuator would wear out a bit more, desynchronizing tests that had worked in the past. That necessitated more testing, which led to more wear and tear, which then required more testing, and so on.