All the legs on the robot shared a common issue: they would frequently break. The more I improved other areas of the robot, such as speed and stabilization, the more often the legs would break. Specifically, the brackets holding the motors in place would snap along the layer lines, requiring a complete replacement of the part. This was a major problem, probably the most significant challenge I faced with the robot. To address it, I spent many weeks redesigning the parts, adjusting print settings, reprinting, and testing. However, progress was slow, as I could only produce three new components a week due to time constraints. Another approach I took was modifying parts of the code, but while this sometimes helped, it often had no effect.

Eventually, I realized that about 50% of the breaks were caused by the robot slipping, which put too much weight on certain legs. To mitigate this, I adjusted the code and added LEGO tires to the legs for better grip. This slightly reduced the frequency of breakages, but the reality was that some legs were still breaking due to the robot's weight and movement. By the end of the school year, the robot remained fast, functional, and clean, but unreliable. On my last day, as I was disposing of old parts, I made an important realization. The filament I had been using was different from the one used for the first iteration of the robot. After a quick test, I discovered that the filament I had used all year was faulty—its strength was less than 40% of the original filament. Despite both filaments being PLA, the new one was either expired or of poor quality, and it was the root cause of all my issues. Although this was a disappointing revelation, I had no time left to make any changes.

A significant amount of progress was made in the code segment of this project. When I first encountered the code, I was completely confused and had no idea how it worked. It consisted of over 1000 lines of code in a language I wasn’t familiar with. After many hours of reviewing and examining different sections, I eventually started to understand how specific parts worked and the fundamentals of how the robot operated.

There were several key changes I wanted to make in the code. First, I aimed to drastically increase the speed of the robot. While this wasn’t particularly difficult, it led to new issues with part breakages. At one point, one of my motors broke and needed replacing. Unfortunately, the only suitable replacement I had was a motor that received inputs differently. Through extensive testing, I discovered that all instructions sent to this motor were mirrored along the centre compared to the other motors. Once I figured this out, it became a matter of inputting a function to mirror all commands for this motor around the centrepoint, which took some time. Aside from changing the output ports for most of the motors, the only other modifications I made were adjusting the operating heights of various parts of the robot (e.g., standard body height, leg adjustments).