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DASH FREEYSGOL GYFUN ABERAERON's ARCHER
This mouse won the schools' standard class in June 1998. It started off as a DASH FREE kit but they have done extensive development work to improve performance.
The wheels and tyres have been modified for greater grip and wider track. If you look carefully you can see that there is a white mark (Tipp-Ex?) on the tyre. This is presumably there so that it is easier to see if the wheels are spinning or skidding. The greater wheel track should make motor speed setting less critical.
You can also see that three of the speed-setting trimmers have been replaced with multi-turn pots. This should also help with accurate adjustment.
The slider from the kit has been replaced with a castor. This reduces friction if the mouse is not well balanced. However any weight on the castor is weight transferred from the driving/braking wheels and can cost traction. The grippier tyres probably compensate for this.
ARCHER uses a bigger battery stack than normal. It has no less than 8 primary cells for a potential 12 volts to the motors. I am surprised that they manage to keep it on the track with all that power available!
Presumably to cope with the extra power from these batteries, the power transistors have been fitted with heatsinks.
The sensors are supported on thick wires which should allow adjustment by simply bending the wires. They have adopted a staggered sensor setup with the inner sensor leading the outer one. This will give a long braking distance from the inner sensor while keeping the lever short for the outer sensor to improve the stability of the edge following algorithm.
The other major change from a DASH FREE is that they have taken an idea from elsewhere on this site and added active braking with a power FET across the inner motor.
This view shows some details of the travelling container for the mouse. It is a sturdy custom-made plastic container with support and positioning blocks fitted inside. This sort of container is very important to prevent damage to the mouse in transit.
As you can see they travel complete with a respectable set of tools and support. This mouse has previously won a local competition in Wales and the team have a very professional approach. For example, you can see that they support their sponsors with advertising both on their transit box and the mouse itself.
ARCHER will take some beating in future competitions. There are still some areas where they can make improvements. The most notable is that they have not used an area-coverage sensor on the inside. If they adopt this they should be able to recover more quickly from corners and cut lap times.
Beyond that, they can probably only make improvements by reducing and redistributing the weight. Their current competition time of 7.2 seconds is the second fastest DASH FREE based time that I have ever seen. The best was DANGERMOUSE 2 which managed 6.38 seconds at Loughborough but it was not as reliable and consistent as ARCHER.
WELL DONE YSGOL GYFUN ABERAERON!
