Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

Our team reduced weight by removing all comments from code and deleting the 1s from the HEX file. After all, the 0s are just a lot of nothing and comments are completly worthless. ;)

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

we dont drill no stinking holes in our robot

we poke them through with a pick-axe!

BTW, if you need to save about 5 pounds, have your robot weighed with a dead battery - you'd be amazed how much those trillions of tiny electrons weigh!

EDIT: oh I just remembered - they make you turn your bot on when its weighed, to make sure you are not using a dead battery :o

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

You do have something with that last year we had one battery we bought weighed almost a pound less then the one in the kit.

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

(shhhhhh! thats cause you live in Canada and they figure they can send you defective batteries and you wont bother to weight them in kilograms and convert it to pounds to see if you got everything you paid for!

its a huge problem! :^)

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

haha
1.) i would give Canadians much more credit then u just did
2.) we happen to be a team from Windsor Connecticut USA

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

Our scale only goes up to 25 lbs. We weighed our bot at a scrimage yesterday and it weighed 126 lbs. 40 lbs had been added in the previous 48 hours before that (we went build crazy, adding a second deck that folds out and an arm that looks more like a scorpion's tail than anything else.) We had to change some pneumatic stuff today, and we would have gone over weight. So we made the second deck and tail look like the muzzle of an automatic rifle ^_^

Before we ship it out, I want to count the amount of zipties that are in used on our Bot. I think I'll count weight-holes too. I can't belive we have more holes than zipties . . .

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

We have a 3 inch hole saw. Bye bye weight.

Unfortunatly we are at 130 lbs right now, but we still have to add our claw. This will probably entail removing our wings (which weren't really going to work, anyway)

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

last year we wieghed 80lbs!!! to bad this year we are 130-135ish.

can you add decorations after you wiegh in??

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

any weight added by decorations must make you still under weight after you weigh every thing together needs to be under 130 :( it sucks we wont get to paint our arm and other things no room for weight

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

our robot needs to go on SERIOUS diet... of course we have to take the weight off somehow... but lets finish building it first...

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

we built light this year.... and it payed off
no swiss cheese nessesary... yet.

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

Thanks, Jeff. Let the whole world know that I, the Great DANE, has screwed into the plastic casing of the battery. Whoopee.

It was late. It was crunch time. I was tired, and didn't look where I was going. Too late. I hit the plastic and watched the drill bit sieze. I pulled it out straight away and realized what I had done.
By the by, it is perfectly safe to use a breached battery. That's a gel-cel, and gel-cels don't leak. Furthermore, I only hit the first outer shell. In the end, it was one of our most-used batteries, and no hiccups came from it, but it didn't stop my teammates from using it as cannon fodder to pin everything and anything on me. Being the team scapegoat is okay, if you can take the wrath.

Sparks

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

It's funny that this topic came back to the top of the pile of threads, since today was the day that I finally asked 303 what the holey metal they used on their robot this year that is pictured HERE.
It was premade sheet metal BTW, from HERE.

That's a nice piece of swiss.

Re: Who is drilling holes this year ??
 

Team 469 isn't planning to drill holes, but we expect to.

"Is there anything critical behind there? Is this a high stress part?"
"No."
"Drill it."

Of course, there are those little things before build season we do to lighten the robot. In case you didn't notice, the sideplates on our robot in 2004 were milled on the back. At a glance, they appeared to be solid 1/4" aluminum plate. And then there's the rest of the robot, which was hastily swiss-cheesed...