August 12, 2006:
February 12th, 2009:
It took a week out of my life, but I bought the SPORE game and after 70 hours of play I "beat" it. Read Team Toad's review of SPORE.
June 30th, 2008:
Ice Cube had 2 wins and 2 losses at RoboGames 2008, not as good as our last event, but at least Ice Cube was still fighting.
Read all about it in our RoboGames 2008 trip report.
August 12, 2006:
We're proud to announce that Ice Cube went 2-0 to become the 2006 RFL MW Champion!
Read all about it in our RFL 2006 Nationals Event Report.
You can also go directly to our RoboGames 2006 photo gallery.
June 20, 2006:
In our best showing outside of our local Pittsburgh area, Ice Cube took second place at RoboGames 2006, with a record of 6 wins, 2 losses, and 2 knockouts. Read all about it in our RoboGames 2006 Report.
You can also go directly to our RoboGames 2006 photo gallery.
April 12, 2006:
We're back from Battle Beach with a 2nd and 3rd place in the Middleweights. We have the start of our BB4 trip report and our BB4 photo gallery.
March 29, 2006:
After a two and a half year hiatus from robot combat, we've decided to jump back into the sport this Spring at Battle Beach.
Since this event coincides with Dan's custody with us, we jumped at the chance to put him back behind the controls of Lionheart, his champion middleweight.
Lionheart took eighth place in the 2003 RFL Nationals with Fuzzy driving (Dan couldn't get away from school for the event). Dan's loss to Hoarf was a heartbreaker, since Lionheart lost by getting stuck under the arena walls. Lionheart had two chunks of steel on its nose to prevent getting stuck, but Hoarf managed to knock those off.
Here we see Dan sharpening Lionheart's nose and you can see that we added two more chunks of steel to prevent getting stuck. In order to avoid having these knocked off, we use round chunks of steel hoping to deflect any spinning weapons.
There is a four robot limit to make an event a qualifier for the RFL nationals, so when a couple of middleweights dropped out, we decided to resurrect our other middleweight, Ice Cube.
Ice Cube last fought at the Robot Club, when it took third place and a thorough drubbing from Lionheart. Still, Ice Cube is our pluckiest robot with that oddly aggressive bouncing action caused by the spring steel hoop.
Ice Cube relies on 36 volt Battlepacks for power, so we had to load test our four year old batteries to make sure they're in fighting shape. That array of lights is not designed to attract UFO's...it's our current sink to drain batteries. With nine 50 watt bulbs, it draws 450 watts or about 12 amps at 36 volts.
Our tests indicate that our 3.6 Ahr packs are still putting out 3.1 Ahr's even after four years. Not bad!
October 28, 2005:
Team Toad is proud to welcome our newest honorary member,
SGT Andy Vinh, who is currently serving in Iraq. He wanted to
know if he could enter his Humvee in the really really heavy weight class.
I didn't have the heart to tell him about the "no projectile" rule in the
Tech Regs.
Andy, our hats are off and our hearts go out to you...we're proud to have you on the team.
April 7, 2004:
The new "Team Toad Secret Lab" building is complete, but progress is slow
in moving the various tools, robots, furniture and fixtures out of the
storage trailer and into the shop. The unrelenting snow and ice last winter,
and the continued delay of actual spring weather has prevented us from
getting back into the robot building business.
As a result, Team Toad will be taking a year off from competitive robotics.
Instead, we'll be focusing our creative and constructive efforts on our
plan to attend Burning Man over Labor
Day Weekend.
We do note with pride that both the
NERC and the
RSA
have held successful robot fighting competitions using arenas
donated by the Robot Club.
We completed construction and testing of our newest lightweight,
HalfPipe, and started packing the
truck. We leave for Minnesota Thursday morning.
September 9, 2003:
Team Toad is headed to
the Nationals in Minnesota.
Our middleweight Lionheart and our newest robot, our
lightweight HalfPipe are both entered.
HalfPipe is a new robot built to replace SnowFlake,
which is a licensed BattleBot.
September 16, 2003:
