Cheap and Dirty Prototype
 

This is my team's (2972) cheap and dirty prototype from about a week ago. We had an issue with the pneumatics, but didn't feel like fixing it right away so I was the piston. Enjoy!

Re: Cheap and Dirty Prototype
 

Looking pretty decent for a prototype! Any reason the robot didn't strafe?

Re: Cheap and Dirty Prototype
 

Good job getting a functional robot built so quickly!

I recommend adding a plastic slope to the human players station to get a realistic tote drop.

Re: Cheap and Dirty Prototype
 

The mecanum wheel orientation may have something to do with that...

Re: Cheap and Dirty Prototype
 

Hi there,

You will get better performance (actually being able to strafe) out of mecanum wheels by installing them on your robot in the correct orientation. When viewed from the top, the rollers on the chassis should form an 'X' as outlined in this document.

Good luck this season!

-Nick

Re: Cheap and Dirty Prototype
 

Can that tote input placement actually be achieved with the chute ramp there?

Re: Cheap and Dirty Prototype
 

Something else I noticed early on in the video - your first pickup attempt was with a non-2015 tote. I noticed after scrolling through that you were able to handle the yellow 2015 tote just fine as well, but keep in mind as you refine that pickup that you'll want to make sure it meshes with the 2015 totes and not necessarily with prior years'.

1923 made a prototype off an older tote and had to shamefully re-construct it when we noticed we weren't using the correct ones. Whooooooooops. Turns out the second refinement works just fine with both, but it was an important lesson to learn about double-checking measurements on the real thing.

Re: Cheap and Dirty Prototype
 

Video! (or it didn't happen) :)

Re: Cheap and Dirty Prototype
 

Actually, with the wheels in the orientation in the video, strafing wouldn't be a problem, though the required wheel rotations would be swapped. The real issue with the swapped wheels is that the robot can't rotate very well. In fact, their COG must be off-center even without a load to be able to rotate at all. The rotation actually gets better as the load increases and the COG moves farther forward.

Re: Cheap and Dirty Prototype
 

Our actual robot design is pretty different from what is shown in the video, but thanks for all the comments. Thanks for pointing out the wheel orientation, we will fix that for our final bot. Also yes we were using some old totes, but we figured that they are close enough to do testing with. Ill be posting our plans and progress on our robot later.