Shameless Self Promotion
Shameless Self Promotion
Shameless Self Promotion (a.k.a. SSP) is a Beetleweight control bot designed by Seth Schaffer of Team 'Just 'Cuz Robotics, and the test platform for the SSP Combat Robot Kit. SSP competed in January and March 20223 NHRL events with a V0.9 and V0.95 design of the SSP kit. The only differences between SSP and the kits are that Shameless Self Promotion uses older beta Motherboard revisions and a slightly different chassis that's a bit worse than what the kits use, and SSP uses undyed wheels while the kits ship with black wheels and no lid decal. Functionally they are almost identical.
January 2023 NHRL - New Bot Event
In January NHRL, SSP had a few teething issues but still performed very well with wins over lifter bot Slamson 2Chicken 2Huffin, Peter Bar vertical spinner kit Basado, and in a grudge match Fingertech Beater Sadiq, and losing only a JD split decision against the undercutter Off Beat, despite having disabled Off Beat's spinner and a drive side. The main issue SSP faced was lifter durability in January, but nothing on the whole robot broke except a few bent or damaged screws and the aluminum servo horn.
March 2023 NHRL
With the official announcement of the kit in January and preorders flooding in, SSP needed to get a few upgrades to make the kit even more reliable by March. So a steel replacement servo horn was fitted and a few other minor improvements were implemented. Although 25 kit chassis were already on hand SSP ran with the same exact battle damaged billet UHMW chassis as in January to test the longevity of that component. To help counter beater bars, we turned to RECR.us who waterjet a set of AR600 claw forks to use against beater bars for about $30. A third V0.9 chassis and collection of kit parts with orange TPU was sent to Matthew Lantry to compete at this event as SSP (Shameless Self Advertising). SSA was running the V1.0 motherboard instead of the beta versions but was otherwise the same as SSP. Unfortunately Seth forgot to bring any spare DartBox Dragon drive motors so we had to pray we didn't break any (spoiler - we didn't).
The March event was a ton of fun and SSP went super deep, winning fights against many brutal spinners. SSP continued its breaking undercutter streak, disabling the weapons of Plot Twist and CatTastrophe 2. It managed to outlast Saber for a KO victory and despite a malfunctioning lifter, bullied Blackbird all around the arena for a split JD win. It even got to prove its lifter was overengineered by lifting and shoving 5.4 pound Pawsitively Hissterical around the arena, and accidentally ripping out its battery just before the 3 minute mark. However some gremlins and electrical issues ultimately led to its demise against Apex in the top 16, for an overall 9th place finish among the massive 164 bot field.
