please Help!
 

How much should (or has your) working chasis wieght? Please give me an idea of how we are doing.

about 36pounds for a complete metal frame of our robot

Well how much does your it weigh right now?

Ours (team 930) is estmating their working chasie to weigh about 75 pounds. We are hoping to knock it down to 70 building it.

That should get you thinking on what we are building as a chasie :-) I will not mention our design

Now what you definetion of chassis, is it just the square of material that the wheels are mounted on, or do you count add ons like arms and other appendages, I personaly define it as just the square of material the the motors are on, With that I say our "Chassis" weighs 10 pounds

we are at 60 pounds with a working drivetrain and battery. this scares me because this leave only 70 pounds for the rest of the robot. what do you think?

Depending on what you have in mind for your machine to do, you could be fine, or you could have problems....it all depends on what you want to do with the weight you have left...

Our lower deck of the frame is the maximum dimensions and consists of 6 pieces of extrusion, 8 corner gussets, and hardware and weighs 10.5 pounds. We will be adding a couple plates for mounting the gearboxes, a couple more for the arms, and 8 more short pieces of extrusion to stand off the plates that hold the arms. The 8 pillow blocks for the axles weigh maybe 4 pounds, then there's the 14 pound battery, all the sprockets and chains and bearings, wheels, axles, shaft collars, 4 drive motors, 2 window motors for the arms, and our suction device (which is going to be so cool you will faint when you see it in action) , and electronics.

And not to forget the rotating light. This is especially important to remember if you are going under the bar.

The bottom line is, you're robot is going to meet or exceed the 130 pound limit no matter what you do. I don't see any sense in weighing things like motors or electronics because they are going to weigh what they are going to weigh. Just try to keep the thing light from the start because that limit comes up A LOT faster than you might think.

Actually your on track. We are around the same weight area for our robot and we expect to be underweight.
36 pound frame
16 pound battery
16 pounds compressor
20 pounds completed gearbox assembly(with wheels)
10 pounds motors and nuts
That is 98 pounds with a an almost complete robot like you have it. Add a few extra pounds for control system and electronics and guess what you don't have to drill any holes in your robot. Of course our robot is a simple design and I'm estimating some of the objects weight on the heavy side

wow, the battery is 16 pounds? it doesn't feel that heavy when i pick it up though...weird

Our frame in total is 17.6 pounds....

I thought it was more around 13 pounds?

*Cough* Speed holes *Cough*

yeah, we weighed our battery the other day, i believe it was 13.2lbs

Our frame made of extruded aluminum and Lexan weight 30 lbs, motor mount, plate, and sprockets are 14.5lbs, THE BATTERY WEIGHS 14 LBS! Each track assemply will weigh in at 16-17 pounds, and with a sundry of other weight costs, we're hovering at 108 lbs.

the compressor isn't 16 lbs. It's maybe... 7 max.

chassis weight
 

Our base weighed in at 70 lbs, with the battery.

Our battery weighs 14 lbs., weighed on a calibrated scale at our Ford plant.

We figure we'll have to add weight to come up to 130 lbs.

weight
 

Our robot weighs 66 pounds w/ motors, control board, battery, compressor, and the "extra stuff." We are good to go on weight here.

If you have different batteries from the past years, it make sense to weight each of them, and pick the lightest one for your robot at the regional. I've heard team lose a whole pound just because they switch to a lighter battery, especially to a older one. That way, you don't have to worry about FIRST scale not working :P.

hmm. our battery weighs in at 13.7. Our frame is only 11.6. Interesting.

well thats about double what it weighed last year so im not sure if its the right or the wrong direction

Check this thread from FIRST forum - may not be able to use any batteries other than from the 2003 kit.

http://jive.ilearning.com/thread.jsp...=330&trange=15

Our main concern is keeping one charged during the competition if you only have 2 to work with.

There is definitely up to 1 pound difference in weights among batteries, even same year and model

We've managed to get ours less than 100lbs. That leaves 30lbs of extra stuff for us. We basically have everything that we need on the robot considered.

With a battery, the light, drill motors, transmission, and drivetrain - as well as all other entirely passive systems (not requiring motors or pneumatics) - we weigh approximately 95 lbs.

I expect another 30 lbs. of junk to pile on before we're done. :)

Don't know specificly about chassis but our robot without any electronics or wires or batery or light weights around 95 lbs. We're pretty light this year....YAY, that gives us lots of room for some serious tweaks.

I told you guys I was guestimating them because I actually forgot how much it weighed. It's always more useful to overestimate than to under. You'll be overweight if you underestimate it enough and then underweight if you overestimate it.

I think there will be a lot of "interesting" chassis desings. I won't go any further because I don't wish to give away my team's design :)

Our frame weights 30 lbs. After we add some lexan covers it'll probably be 40... 15lb batt, the compressor is only 5ish, the light is maybe 1...

ACK.

Lets see, 10 lb gearboxes, 30 lb magical levitator...

hmmm

ACK, TIME TO DRILL HOLES!

Greg


(PS, teams at regionals... make sure your pnumatic holding tanks are empty when you weigh in).

Now, what im thinkin is, what happens if we say out robot weighs 130 lbs on Mercury....Its a smaller planet with less gravitational pull, therefore the robot WEIGHS less there...

..Now, if they had said your robot must have a mass of 130 lbs.....

That would be worse, pounds is not a unit of mass!!!!!!!

Yeah, but still, nonetheless, you get the concept. If we take the mass of the object, it's based regardless of weight...So, rather then edit my last post, ill juss retract what i said and say 59.09 kg. Alright, there, happy? heh

The battery weighs 13.45 lbs (uncharged, without 6# wire), and the compressor weighs 4.73 lbs. I'm going to assume you're using extrusion due to the weight of the frame (36 lbs :eek: ).

awesome chasis
 

Total drivetrain assembly weighs around 27 pounds with motors and gear assemblies plus drive platform.

our complete chassis weighs 9 pounds. thats without a tranny or anything. but the chassis itsself that holds the robot is 9 pounds

Is ours to heavy
 

our chassis with motors wheels and such weighs 88lbs. is that to heavy? We still plan to mount a robotic arm and the controllers. what would you recommend to do, we have already put many holes in the frame to reduce weight?

Re: Is ours to heavy
 

Haha, speed holes, the way of FIRST...What are you using as a material for the chassis? Got any pics we can see to help ya with reccomendations as to what we could do to cut that down?


...and again, "My bot meets Weight requiremnts on mercury"...

we put our chassis,all motors, actuators,valves,electrical components and everything we think we need to use plus a big 4000 page book on a scale and it wieghed 85 pounds. id say were pretty good as far as wieght. :)

team 61.. We are up to 120 pounds but we are just about finished and we plain on using all 10 pounds that is left we always push to the max.... We have not worked really late nights and i can't believe that we are almost done.... :D I look forward to see some other teams post pictures of there robots we have a few posted already..

First 5 pictures are ours

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/pi...DESC&sort=date

The weight
 

I heard this team...somewhere in bloody ole Connecticut has a chassi which weighs about 8.5lbs. That's bloody good. Good luck to the chaps in Connecticut competiting with these cats.

If your frame is under 10 pounds and made of legal material, it is not strong enough.

Greg

It is quite possible for a frame to weigh less than 10 pounds, if for example, it were made of wood and the robot was only 10 inches tall.

The Weight
 

These cats tell me its made of somesort of metal. I've felt it, it certainly feels strong enough. Sorry gents, can't divuldge anymore than that.


And my good friend Greg,

"the world demand for computers might be as high as five."

-Thomas Wason, head of IBM, 1940.


make your correction sport,

"the world demand for computers might be as high as five."

-Thomas Watson, head of IBM, 1940.

Watson

A quick question is it legal to build out of fiber glass? Because that stuff is lighter than aluminum and close to steel in terms of strength and wieght.

Perhaps you mean that fiberglass' strength to weight ratio is comparable to that of steel?

I just hope that the teams making 10 lb frames out of wood realize the forces involved in head on, full speed crashes (which autonomous mode almost guarantees).

Just some thoughts :)

Greg

Oh, i'll fix my profile - im suprised no one pointed that out to be before now :P

Greg-
I love that quote from Watson. You must want to work for IBM in the near future. Good luck to you chap.

when I was on truck (68) last year, our frame weighed only 9 or 9.5 lbs and it was made of 1" square stock with a wall thickness of 1/8".

I didn't say a 10 lb frame would have been ok LAST year, but this year your robot will be running into things on its own for the first 15 seconds.

Today we put our working chasis, our electronic board, pneumatic board and cyclinders, arm metal tubing, and light on a scale. We better start drilling holes, 129 lbs. Luckily that include a 6 lb plywood board we had mounted the pneumatic system on for prototyping. We think we are going to cut a lot off out the aluminum tubing from the kit that we used one the back. If all else fail, we will be a pushing bot.

Oh man, the best of luck to you. Just watch your speed holes, you might end up loosing a lotta structural integrity. Com'n, post some pics and let us pick away at hte bot ;) I'm sure someone on this forum will have an idea on how you can cut down on weight.

Re: Re: Is ours to heavy
 

lead :D
j/k

we are really using Structural Aluminum Extrusion

EX-2

it is light enough and strong enough it is our other stuff that worries me, sorry Web Page team hasn't posted any pictures yet that i can link you to