The robot workshop is where you create or modify your robots. Every great robotics team has a well-stocked workshop with plenty of robot parts and components, welding gear, grinders, and other tools to construct that next superbot. The RA2 workshop has everything you need to build, wire, and paint your robot to your specifications. Of course, none of the parts will cost you a penny and you always put a perfect seam on your weld! The point here is to build a great robot, not to manage your checkbook or hold a torch steady.
So, let's go over the main parts of the workshop and what you can do. You've probably already discovered that to get to the workshop, you first need to have a robotics team formed. In Team HQ, under the Robots menu choice, you have six slots for your robots. Double click any of the slots, or select one and click the Workshop button in the lower right.
You'll now see six buttons at the top of your screen: Overview, Chassis, Components, Wiring, Paint Shop, and Test Robot. Clicking on any of these will change your main view to work in each of those areas. You can click them in any order, but some are dependent on others. For example, you can't add components to your robot until you have a chassis; and you can't wire your robot until you've added the control board component. You'll learn how this works as you spend time in the workshop.
Most of the workshop areas will have a 3D view of your robot on the left side of the screen, and some options or controls on the right side. If you haven't built a robot chassis yet, you won't see anything in the 3D view.
The Overview section lets you give a name to your robot and shows you how much the bot currently weighs. You can also take a "snapshot" of your robot, which will be used in other areas of the game as a preview of the bot. You can rotate the 3D view by clicking and dragging in the window with your right mouse button. You can also zoom using the mousewheel. This is true of nearly any 3D view in the workshop. If you don't yet have a robot created, of course, this does nothing.
Your chassis is the main framework that makes up the shape of your robot. Think about a car that has no wheels, engine, seats, or gas tank. Take away all the stuff attached to the car and you are left with the core chassis.
The Chassis section of the workshop is where you create the shape of your chassis, and select the armor material used to construct it. You'll see a button to do each of these things on the main chassis screen. Of course, you can't set an armor type if you haven't yet built the chassis. Also note that building a chassis is a core part of creating your robot and must be done before you can add components or other steps. And if you ever want to change the shape of your chassis, you will lose any components that have already been placed. After all, the guys in the machine shop can't exactly cut and weld sheetmetal with a motor screwed into the thing, can they?
RA2 lets you be the designer when it comes to your chassis shape. After clicking the Structure Design button from the Chassis screen, you will be given a blank blueprint. (If you already had worked on a chassis and are changing it, the blueprint will show your last chassis shape.)
Step 1 of creating your chassis is to draw the outline of your robot baseplate. This is the bottom of the robot, but it will also be related to the top, as you'll see in step 2. Imagine you are looking at the bot from the top down, and begin plotting points on the blueprint grid to draw your outline. If you don't want to snap to grid lines, you can un-check the option to snap. There are a few rules you need to follow: Your last point must always connect back to your first point. No lines can ever intersect. No two points can be closer than one grid unit. You have a maximum of 16 points to use.
There are also a few other options you'll see here. If you don't want to plot points by hand, you can use the automatic shape tools for circular and rectangular bot shapes. My example here is a rectangle, but I plotted the points by hand, anyway.
In step 2, the baseplate shape that you drew has been extruded into 3D space. The smaller window on the right shows a preview of your chassis. Use your right-mouse button to click and drag in this view to rotate it. You still have a blueprint for this step, but now you are editing the top panel of the chassis. You can't draw a new shape here, you can only select points and move them to a new position. This lets you create slanted panels or other modified chassis shapes. Again you have some restrictions about intersecting lines. You don't have to edit the top panel, if you want the sides of your bot to go straight up, just leave the top outline identical to the bottom one. In my example here, I have dragged two of the points back along the chassis length to make a wedge-shape in the front of the chassis.
Also in step 2, you set the height of your chassis. Use the slider on the right side of the screen to adjust how high you want your top panel to be.
When you are finished editing points and are satisfied with the height, click the Finished button. Remember, once you start adding components to this chassis, you can't change its shape, so be sure you are happy with it at this point.
After you have built a chassis, the Armor button will be available. Clicking it gives you a choice between four armor types: Polymer, Aluminum, Titanium, and Steel. Each type has a strength and a weight. You might want a lighter weight material for your robot to make a certain weight class or to drive faster. Or, if you aren't concerned about weight and speed, you can pick the heavier materials which will give your robot more protection.
There is a checkbox here to "use default chassis appearance" when selecting your armor. If this is checked, when you pick an armor type, your chassis appearance will be modified to look like that particular armor. If you would prefer to paint the chassis surface yourself, you can uncheck this option and your chassis appearance will not be changed. You will always be setting the weight and strength of your chassis; this option simply lets you texture your chassis automatically or not.
Now that you have your chassis created, you can start to place components in it. After selecting the Components choice from the top menu, you will see a semi-transparent view of your chassis. This lets you see the shape of your bot, but also place components inside of it. Remember how to rotate your view? Drag your right-mouse button in the 3D viewing area. Mousewheel zooms in and out. You will frequently need to adjust your view in order to accurately place a component.
You will see several categories of components in the upper right:
This tutorial won't cover all of the various components. You will learn more about some of them in the mobility and mechanics tutorials.
Clicking any of the category icons will show you a list of components. This list scrolls from left to right. Selecting any component in the list shows you a preview and description. The preview window has some green attachment points that you can select to help place the component. Don't worry about that for now. We'll just use the default points for this tutorial.
Every robot needs to have a control board. This is the first component in the Power category. Select it and press the Attach button to begin the process of attaching. Just click it, no need to click and drag. The component will appear in the 3D view at the position of your mouse. Move your mouse around and you'll see the control board move, too. Now move your mouse overtop the baseplate of your chassis. The control board aligns itself to the baseplate showing you that it can be placed there. (Remember to rotate your view with your right-mouse button if you need a better angle to see the chassis baseplate. You will still be in attachment mode even while rotating the view.) To drop the control board on the baseplate, just click your left mouse button. The control board must be completely inside the chassis in order to be dropped. If it is intersecting with a wall of the chassis, it will appear red, meaning it is not in a valid position.
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| Invalid placement | Placement ok |
Pretty easy, huh? But what if you wanted to rotate the direction that the component faces? It doesn't really matter which way the control board faces, but a motor would need to be aligned properly. Let's try it with a motor. Click the Mechanics category and select the Redbird Spin Motor. Click the Attach button and drag it onto the baseplate. It defaults to facing one direction, but you might want the axle to point a different way. While the motor is over the baseplate, hold the Shift key and move your mouse. Aha! It rotates to face any direction. When you have it aligned the way you want, release the shift key and you can continue to move it around in its new orientation. Find a nice spot for it, and click the left mouse to drop it. Notice in my example that I positioned the motor so that the axle passes through the chassis. Axles are allowed to do this, but the body of the motor is not. You'll soon learn which components are allowed to pass through the chassis walls and which ones are not.
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| Starting orientation | Hold Shift to rotate |
Wait, it gets better! What if you want something placed higher up in the chassis? In other words, you don't want it placed flush to the baseplate, but instead want it raised up a few inches. Simply hold the CTRL key down and the component can be raised up off of the baseplate. You'll definitely need to get proficient at changing your view to do an action like this. You'll find that you start with a top down view, choose a location on the baseplate, rotate your view to the side, then hold CTRL and raise it up and drop it. A bit tricky for beginners, but you'll quickly learn to do it. It is particularly useful when you are out of space on your baseplate and want to position a control board above another component. Or if you are placing a weapon motor or piston and don't want it to be at the lowest position in your chassis.
So let's get back to placing components. So far you have a control board and a motor. Now let's add something for the motor to spin. The easiest thing for now is a wheel. Click the Treads category and pick the N12 Wheel. Click the Attach button and move your mouse over the Red Bird motor that you placed. The wheel pops onto the end of the axle. Wheels automatically know that they are allowed to attach only to axles. You might notice that you can't place a wheel on the baseplate of the chassis the way you can place motors or the control board.
For the sake of keeping this tutorial short, we'll just add one more component and then move on to other things. To power your motor, you'll need a battery. In the Power category, pick the Nifty 6V Battery and place it anywhere on the baseplate.
Since you have a control board and a motor, you can wire your robot. If you didn't have the control board you couldn't do any wiring. And if you didn't have the motor, you would be able to do wiring, but would have no components needing it!
Click the Wiring button on the top menu. The wiring panel shows the same transparent 3D view, as well as a blank robot controller. You can set up your controller however you like. You will see a grid of empty slots on your controller and three different control types at the top of the screen.
It's best to think through what you want to do with your robot, then build an appropriate controller. In our example here, we have only one motor with a wheel attached. Let's build a simple controller to drive that wheel in one direction. Click and drag a Button Control from the three choices onto an empty slot on the controller.
As soon as you drop the control, you get a window asking for more information. You can give this control a name to help you remember what it does. It could be something like "drive forward", or "trigger weapon", or whatever you like. You don't need to give it a name if you can remember what it does.
You also need to assign an input to the controller. Click the rectangular field next to the "Button on/off" label and select a key on your keyboard that will activate this button. My example uses the W key. You could also hilight the field and press one of the buttons on a joystick or gamepad if you prefer. Click OK when you are finished.
Ok, so you now have a button control set up on your robot controller. You also have decided that the W key will activate it (or whichever key you chose). But it still is not wired to anything on your robot. With the button control selected (shows a blue border around the controller slot), click on the motor that you attached to the robot. A new window appears asking you to decide how this control will be wired to this motor.
The spin motor gives you two options in the drop-down list for how this control might be wired. The button can either make the motor spin clockwise or spin counterclockwise. Pick either one for this example. I selected clockwise. Click OK when you are done.
That's it for wiring. You have chosen a control type, assigned a key to it, and wired it to your motor. Obviously most robots have more than one motor, and many also have more than one control wired to each motor. But for this example, we should be able to see how it is working. Click on the Test Robot button at the top of the screen.
You now see your robot in the test garage. (Every good workshop has an area to test the robot. You know...beat up some 50 gallon drums or a pile of cinderblocks.) Go ahead and press the key you assigned (example used "W"). You should see the motor turn on, which spins the wheel and makes the bot start moving around in circles. Pretty much impossible to drive, of course, with only one wheel that can only go one direction. But you get the point. The next tutorial will go into more detail on ways to build and wire your bot for driving.
Congratulations! Go back to the Overview screen, give your bot a name and take a snapshot. It's pretty much a useless piece of junk, but you made it, so nice job!