View Full Version : the firefly effect
"what was that?"
"I dont know, what was that"
"did something just fall off my goram ship?"
ok this all comes up because last week we were stress testing the robot, and bolts/nuts/ other things kept falling off and no one knew where they went( we have sense decided that those parts went that important seeing as it hasn't broke in half yet).
so I want to hear some other teams stories about things on the robot falling off.
Al Skierkiewicz
20-02-2006, 17:39
During the building of Apollo spacecraft, the vendor would put the ship on a three dimensional rotating table that would eventually rotate out all loose parts before the craft would be considered to be worthy of zero gravity. When it was over, three five gallon buckets of stuff were swept up from the floor which included stripped ends of wire, hardware and other things.
From "Chariots for Apollo".
ReaverOfSouls
20-02-2006, 17:42
During the times we scrimmaged against other teams nuts and bolts would fall off our robot. After an extensive search we never found their original location. We concluded they were parts dropped in by accident and forgotten, hopefully.
__________________________________________________
The eternal war rages on. Who will win? pirates or ninjas...
Jeff Rodriguez
20-02-2006, 17:44
During the times we scrimmaged against other teams nuts and bolts would fall off our robot. After an extensive search we never found their original location. We concluded they were parts dropped in by accident and forgotten, hopefully.
AHHH!!! REAVERS!!!
j/k :D
Will Bale
20-02-2006, 17:54
A wrench isn't a nesscary part is it?
Last Night, we tested the robot and a large, (yes I said LARGE) wrench fell from somewhere on the robot....Along with bolts, nuts, and a very interestingly cut piece of Aluminum...
The first test....the battery wasn't secured, and we dragged it for about 10 seconds, because I couldn't see the back side of the robot...
KenWittlief
20-02-2006, 17:59
on sailboats the sails and rigging are held up by shackles. Little U shaped fastners with a bolt that closes one end.
One of the tricks sailers play on noobs in their first race: at the start of the race you toss an open shackle onto the deck of the boat next to you.
The skipper thinks it fell off his mast or rigging, and stops to figure out where it came from. If you really lost a shackle from your rigging then either your sails, or you mast would come down.
about half the time when we used our shooter mechanism, set screws would fly off at near dangerous speeds. :ahh: but no one ever got hurt.
thank goodness for lock-tite :D
yeah, LOTS of things have dropped around the shop, knives, screws, screwdrivers, cell phones (mine kamikazied twice before I duck taped it), oh yeah and the robot some how fell off our cart.
We used a good bit of extruded aluminum, all bolted together with probably 100 bolts.
Our first shakedown runs of the robot would result in at least a few bolts left behind. We affectionately call them robot droppings.
I'm sure a lot of other teams using extruded aluminum have similar stories.
Firefly <3
We havn't had anything drop off yet... but probobly soon. Had lots of things drop around the shop though.
Greg Perkins
20-02-2006, 22:18
about half the time when we used our shooter mechanism, set screws would fly off at near dangerous speeds. :ahh: but no one ever got hurt.
thank goodness for lock-tite :D
in the words of great men...
"set screws (inhale audibly)"
do not always rely on set screws to connect sprockets or gears to shafts. keys are always a good choice to use whenever possible.
in the words of great men...
"set screws (inhale audibly)"
do not always rely on set screws to connect sprockets or gears to shafts. keys are always a good choice to use whenever possible.
I know there are some out there who will disagree with me (cough...Paul...cough) but I've used setscrews for gear allignment in the past with no problems. I'll never transfer torque with a setscrew, but using them to keep gears in place on a shaft... no problem.
Set screws don't inhale audibly... poor engineering inhales audibly.
GaryVoshol
21-02-2006, 11:45
After you tighten the set screw on the collar, please remember to remove the t-hex tool before revving the shaft.
Everytime we drove our 'bot, nuts, bolts and screws would just drop off then disappear. I ahem...accidentally rammed it full-speed into a row of our already crappy-looking red lockers and knocked about half a dozen bolts and nuts off. We never found most of them :D
Rick TYler
21-02-2006, 16:14
I ahem...accidentally rammed it full-speed into a row of our already crappy-looking red lockers and knocked about half a dozen bolts and nuts off. We never found most of them :D
The key difference between you and me is that our red lockers are fairly new and only shed some paint when the robot mysteriously rammed them at full speed.
James1902
21-02-2006, 16:29
First off love firefly,
second of all we've had some things fall off like nuts and bolts. We also had a master link on our chain come off and we lost the chain.
Rickertsen2
21-02-2006, 16:39
These past few days the robot has been moved several times to various indivudual's houses. Each time, we lost a little weight. Our first year, a nutdriver was dropped into a piece of square aluminum tubing. It stayed there all through competition until sometime the next year.
Wolf103FM
21-02-2006, 20:34
only thing that i know of that we have dropped off were lots and lots of metal shavings, we did drop the frame off of the table while we were working a few times but everyone always caught it before it went completely off
atomikitten
22-02-2006, 19:43
Everytime we drove our 'bot, nuts, bolts and screws would just drop off then disappear. I ahem...accidentally rammed it full-speed into a row of our already crappy-looking red lockers and knocked about half a dozen bolts and nuts off. We never found most of them :D
Imagine what people would find after your school was renovated.
We don't have any quarter-inch nuts left at school--not because they kept falling off during crashes but because we actually used them up!
We *always* end up with random T-nuts falling off of our robot.
our robot took a beating every time it came down the ramp. we had a few bolts come loose, not to mention part of the camera flew off. afterwards, we had to tighten just about every bolt on the frame (nice and tight this time).
Chriszuma
22-02-2006, 20:38
This is where nylock nuts prove their usefulness. If you can deal with the hassle of putting them on, you never have to worry about losing them.
Oh.
ANd here I thought the Firefly effect was more like creating something fresh and original that will be unjustly ignored by the general public and eventually cancelled.
Silly me. :rolleyes:
Chriszuma
22-02-2006, 21:10
Oh.
ANd here I thought the Firefly effect was more like creating something fresh and original that will be unjustly ignored by the general public and eventually cancelled.
Silly me. :rolleyes:
No, the Firefly effect is when you get screwed over by Fox.
Eldarion
22-02-2006, 21:56
So far, the only resemblence our robot had to the Serenity was the camera module puking off the CMUCam board when our shooters were turned on for the first time. (And the second, and the third, until we finally made a custom mount and screwed it in place :) )
No, the Firefly effect is when you get screwed over by Fox.
Oh you mean where the judges like the good solid working robots but the public, who's voting carries all the weight, pick the "cute" robots to go on in the competition ala American Idol. :p
artdutra04
23-02-2006, 00:31
We didn't have a lot of random nuts and bolts falling off our robot this year. This year we've used a ton of pop rivots instead of zip ties or bolts, so that has been a real weight saver. Careful inspection of the robot as it is being asembled, coupled with precise fabrication of high quality parts can usually help solve the issue of lots of random pieces of hardware coming off your robot.
Loctite and ny-lock nuts are your friends. :)
Mme.Miscellania
23-02-2006, 01:59
We were testing our camera/shooter mechanism, and our motors were slightly out of sync...leading to some vibration...leading to the camera wiggling loose, falling onto the shooter, and flying off the robot at 14 m/s, only to bounce off of a table and land in someone's pocket.
That was when we decided zip ties were our friends.
dude__hi
23-02-2006, 15:11
Our camera shot off it's position due to the vibation of the large rotating wheel of our shooter. It flew across the room crashed into the ground and fortunately it was undamaged.
This year we've had the basic nuts and bolts fall off our robot.
Last year we had our robot's arm fall off during practice, we were doing some driving practice the day after we got it working for the first time. We pick up a tetra and drive over to the goal, raise the arm and just as we're about to move into capping position the arm just falls clean off. As it turned out the bolts that held the arm to the rotating block were just threaded into 1/4 aluminum which just tore out, we later fixed it by bolting it through... it seem to work better go figure :rolleyes:
AV_guy007
23-02-2006, 18:23
our team always has a tool check before matches to make sure nothing is left in the robot, however at the scrimmage we were very close to leaving a nibbler on the bot. :eek:
Mr. Freeman
23-02-2006, 20:28
If our team tried to do a tool check it'd take weeks and we'd still never be sure where the heck everything is or if we even had it.
I don't think we've ever used the correct size wrench to tighten a single bolt on the robot. Just ones that are close enough that they still work.
Anyway, we always loose nuts off of the bot left and right. The really strange thing is that we've never found a single bolt come off. So either there's a whole lot of bolts that are just stuck into holes on the bot or someone keeps dumping bags of nuts on the bot.
StephLee
23-02-2006, 22:02
Loose bolts...shavings...nearly the entire hopper with its frame and the dump system once, that was horrifying...the robot fell over trying to get up the ramp, scared us all half to death and then some.
Random sparking, now there's something fun. We burnt up our first speed controller this year, and boy did that make an interesting smell.
Once, about halfway through the season, a nut got lodged behind a piece of angle aluminum, RIGHT SMACK IN THE MIDDLE, in the only spot we couldn't possibly poke it out. Nearly wound up turning the 'bot on its side and shaking it out...hope we never have to consider that again.
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