How much over did you weigh?!?
 

Lets spill it. We are a whopping 23 pounds over and are desperately figure ways to cut weight without cutting fuctionality. How about you?

116 started out at 165+:eek:
30 lbs later...:D
8lbs left to go...:(

us canadians were sooo close when we went to weigh our bot having no idea of the weight until today. It turned out to be 131 lbs but we wanted to be 5 lbs under soo we put our bot on a diet today and a strict exercise routine and we lost about 10 lbs so we have no problems. I hope you guys can manage to fix your bots weight. I guess i will be seeing a lot of swiss cheese at the comps. well best of luck.

P.S. how exactly do they measue the size of the robot. i recall from our last robotics comp (canada first competition) they put a crate over the bot to see if it would fit in those dimensions. is it similar in FIRST.

Yes, you are put inside a box. At least, they did at VCU last year.

You people that are over 30, tell how much you're going to have to sacrifice, ability wise.

hah, 668 started out at 20 lbs over. we've been swiss cheesin' and jigsawin', but our scale seems very unreliable. we weighed it a couple different ways tonight, and the first few times it read 10 lbs over, and the second few times it read 4 lbs under:rolleyes:

if you ned a really accurate scale, most vets have large digital scales that are very accurate that is how we weigh our bot

118's first weigh-in was at 165+ as well. But that was primarily due to our goal to get up and running as soon as possible. We had not yet lightened our 1/4 thick aluminum top plate (30X33 or so) and our 26' diameter turret. Here's a helpful hint, btw: when lightening, use a mill - you can get more weight faster than a drill press, it looks better, and if you don't punch all the way through, you can keep a large portion of the original strength of the metal. So now we have about seven more pounds to lose. The only loss of functionality might be that our turret is only 25", and we might have to go to an aluminum chassis.

My team (639) was so heavy we had to cut 2 of our wheels off. And i thought 4 had to touch the ground at all times, boy was i wrong.

Greg

We (team 506) weighed are robot two days ago and it was 127... however we still had roughly 20lbs of stuff to add to it, if not more. We totally redesigned one of our systems, and altered some big parts on other systems. Without drilling a single hole we dropped 20lbs, and gained effecinecy without loosing functionality. :-)

One option that we have been kicking around is the airport. The baggage checkin has a scale large enough. THe only thing is calling and getting it okayed...

We may just try a local vet, it closer by 15 minutes too.

Luckily, one of the student's mother is a vet and the clinic is just down the street. Man, that was a cold ride in the back of the truck. Oh yeah, we're down to maybe 3 pounds over.

You can go to Small Parts and purchase an assortment of various sized holes to place on your robot for weight reduction. They are expensive - only the very rich teams can afford them - but it is convenient to be able to move the holes around until you get them just right. We had a box of them around, but unfortunately I mixed up all the sizes in one box and the little ones fell through the big hole and I never found them again.

We tried running the compressor on helium, but the robot had such a squeaky little voice we couldn't stand it.

Permanent magnets are allowed in any amount. You could try aligning their fields against the earth's magentic field to generate some lift. Of course, your 'bot will have to be able to handle directional derivatives, and convolution integrals aren't on the additional hardware list. You might be better off working in the frequency domain.

Next year Exide is coming out with a battery that uses massless neutrinos. Getting rid of that heavy box full of electrons will be a big help - just not this year.

There may be a topological way out, though. If you start with a two-dimensional Moebius strip, and move up to the three-dimensional Klein Bottle, there should be some way to take the next step to a four-dimensional construct (let's call it a "Kamen Manifold") that would get rid of the mass entirely. Then you can work with all kinds of neat things, like PVC pipe with an OD smaller than the ID so that the inside is on the outside.

By the way, how strictly do you think the ref's are going to enforce L'Hopital's Rule this year? I mean, you have to set SOME limits...............

17 lb AGAIN!!!!
 

We weighed in 17 lb over weight, which is funny because last year at first weight-in we were 17 lb over as well.

We ended up losing 30 lb without really losing any functionality this year so we can now add in the extra functionality that we wanted to add.

By the way, look for pictures soon.

-Chris