Bobblebot.co.uk - Antweights and Robot Combat

New Website Arrives Tomorrow

I am pleased to announce that the unfortunate technical issues that have been causing problems for the last week or two have been resolved, and the new website will now be launched tomorrow - Wednesday the 17th of February 2010!

Update

Due to unforeseen technical issues the new website isn't going to make it up today. No guarantees as to when it might be online, but it should definitely be before the end of the week!

New Website Arriving February 1st

Yes, its really happening this time!

I am pleased to announce that our all new website will be arriving on Monday 1st February 2010!

Temporary Site Closure December 2009

Due to the imminent launch of the new website, this one will close sometime near the end of 2009 to allow the necessary changes to be made on the web server.

Please be aware the site may not be accessible for several days around the end of December.
(This should not affect the Antweight Wiki)

But in the mean time...

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! :-)

A Long Overdue Update

Web Site News

It has been a long while since the last update, as I have been busy working on a brand new website that I want to launch at the start of 2009.

It is a great deal of work, as I am essentially rewriting the whole website from scratch. It has been about four years since the website had a major overhaul, so everything is being improved and made better!

Due to this, we also missed our 5th birthday celebrations, which will now happen when the new site is launched in 2009. It will be a long wait, but in the end it will hopefully be worth it.

General Robot Combat News

We are now down to the last three events of the year, two events by Robots Live, and the winter tour final by Roaming Robots. For details, see our live events calender on the home page.

Roaming Robots have recently started a live webcam feed from their events, which many people have made use of so far. The webcam feed can be found on the Roaming Robots website.

Site Updates

It has been a while since the last update, but today the events RSS list has been updated and now contains all the known events from both Robots Live and Roaming Robots for the rest of the year.

The site is being prepared for a major update which will take place in late July to celebrate five years since the website first launched. Various improvements will be made, including an updated look, as well as new and rewritten content. In particular, the Antweights and Robotics sections will be expanded with more useful pages.

I am also looking at including more videos on the site, as well as expanding on some of the popular features already in place, such as the RSS feeds.

Also in July, I will be looking back at how the site has changed since it launched five years ago and uploading the original design from 2003 so everyone can ~~laugh~~ look at it.

Events RSS Feed Update

The events RSS feed has now been updated to work with Roaming Robots' new website. The event links should now work again, and it has updated to include the Guildford event in May.

AWS 25 and Other Updates

Antweight World Series 25 was held on April 5th 2008 in Eindhoven, The Netherlands.

From what I gather Joacim Schwartz won both the non-spinner and the spinner competition with his antweight Flippt! Congratulations Joacim.

Also, in case you were wondering why there has not been many updates on the site recently, it because I am working on the update to the site.

I will post a few screen-shots shortly. This is a much more visual upgrade, as the design that is currently being used on the site was made very quickly, as I spent much of my time on the PHP code behind the website which you never see (unless something goes wrong).

I have no idea when I will finish the update, however it is likely that I will gradually upgrade parts of the site rather than launch everything at once.

Roaming Robots Launch New Website

Roaming Robots launched their new site yesterday. It includes many new features, including games, a robot and team database and Roaming Robot On Demand - which hasn't launched yet, but presumably will be at least as good as the rest of the site.

Here it is: http://www.roamingrobots.co.uk

Antweight Wiki Downtime

The Antweight Wiki will likely be down for a few hours sometime over the next week or so as I make a couple of changes to DokuWiki (the software behind it).

This is website should be unaffected, however you may be unable to access http://www.antweights.co.uk for short periods of time.

Apologies in advance for any inconvenience.

Battlebots Set for November 2008

Battlebots have announced that they are holding their next event on 11th - 16th November 2008. Both the College and Pro events are going to be staged back to back.

More details can be found on the Battlebots website: http://www.battlebots.com/news_home.asp#espn2

Events RSS List Updated

A number of events in our RSS feed have changed places due to issues with the Space Center event in May. The RSS feed has now been updated with the new details of that event and the Easter Robot Rumble has been added.

The events should appear as follows:

Easter Robot Rumble
Date: 22nd/23rd March 2008
Organiser: Roaming Robots

The Triangle - Burgess Hill
Date: 12th / 13th April 2008
Organiser: Robots Live

Fenton Manor, Stoke On Trent
Date: 4th May 2008
Organiser: Roaming Robots

Aylesbury
Date: 11th May 2008
Organiser: Roaming Robots

Space Centre, Leicester
Date: 17/18th May 2008
Organiser: Robots Live

If you subscribe, the list should have automatically updated already.

Battlebots Announces Possible TV Return

Battlebots, the US equivalent of Robot Wars, have announced that the US TV network ESPN have bid for another series of the show, which was cancelled in 2002 after its 5th season.

In the announcement posted on Battlebots.com, they say they are planning to run an event for both student/educational organisations and professional roboteers in June 2008 in the San Francisco Bay Area, USA.

You can read the official announcement on Battlebots.com here: http://www.battlebots.com/news_home.asp#espn

Video of Bobblebot Online

I have uploaded a video of Bobblebot driving around on our table. You can see it pushing a full coke can around as well as the Razer and Dantomkia Robot Wars pullback toys.

You can see it online at: http://www2.bobblebot.co.uk/c/en/Antweights/Bobblebot.html

It was taken several years ago, however very little on Bobblebot has changed since then, other than the fact it has gone through several more sets of tyres.

Major Site Update On The Way

I am preparing to launch a large update to the site within the next month or two. The update will fix various problems with the site, add a couple of new things and give a visual refresh to the look of the site.

The update will be quite beneficial to Internet Explorer 6.0 users, as it adds a compatibility style sheet to the website which will mean that the site works better with IE6. I said a little while ago that I was no longer supporting IE6, however on checking my access logs, I see that around 50% of the Internet Explorer users who visit this site are still on version 6 so clearly supporting it is still worthwhile.

It is also likely that the website will no longer work correctly on computer screens with a resolution of less that 800*600 pixels. I have decided that as nearly all visitors have at least 1024*768 that it is no longer worth sacrificing certain aspects of the design to make sure the site shrinks correctly on smaller screens. This will not affect many people, as in the last two months, only one user has had a resolution of 800*600.

The update will also include a more extensive list of RSS feeds, accessibility controls, an email newsletter, reworked navigation and will also offer a new service that will hopefully prove useful to many people.