pic: Fixing the Winch on the field
 

Re: pic: Fixing the Winch on the field
 

Kyle,
I'm assuming by your team number that you were at BAE. can you give some backstory into what happened?

Re: pic: Fixing the Winch on the field
 

I could give a little. I'm not sure EXACTLY what happened, but I do know that the system for raising and lowering the bar broke. The refs were looking at it for awhile and couldn't fix it. Dean Camen and (at least it looks like it in this picture) Woodie Flowers had to go out to take a look at it in order to repair it.

Re: pic: Fixing the Winch on the field
 

Kyle is probably referring to the winch underneath the 12" platform use for lowering the hanging bar. Its probably stuck.
If proper weight is not applied to bar, it may not lower correctly.
:rolleyes:

Re: pic: Fixing the Winch on the field
 

I never saw this winch being used at the NJ regional- the players were manually lifting their robot off the bar.. it got sketchy when two Moe drivers lifted their robot almost 8 feet up until someone finally poked at it with a pole..

is that uneveness the reason why people at NJ never used the winch?

Re: pic: Fixing the Winch on the field
 

In NJ we never used the bar lowering device due to teams not wanting to and sayibng tey could just lift it off. After the MOE incident you mentioned we did tell them that if they are in the same instance again we will lower it due to time constraints. But the field staff were having some fun raising and lowering some people at times but then again this is FIRST isnt it!

Re: pic: Fixing the Winch on the field
 

What happened at BAE was:

After the bar had been lowered to get the robots off of the bar, then because there was no weight on the bar as it was going back up, the winch cable loosened up and wrapped around the axle on the winch drum, casueing everything to lock up.

They had to lift off the platform in order to reach the winch drum, from then on we used hooks and hung on the bar from both sides on the way up and the way down so there was always even pressure on the bar.

-Aaron

Re: pic: Fixing the Winch on the field
 

Yes that was basically how it happened.
However it happened twice.
I don't know why it came off the second time, but that was the match where there was 4 robots on the bar, so maybe it caused it to be uneven or something. The second time Dean Kamen himself fixed it.

Re: pic: Fixing the Winch on the field
 

Lifting the robot off the bar on Friday and Saturday did take quite a while. Atleast it demonstrated how difficult it is to de-hang us. The more you lift the bot the tighter the pneumatic cyclinders grip the bar. If you want to knock GizMOE off the bar, you better bring 5 guys and a stick. :D

Re: pic: Fixing the Winch on the field
 

Our robot is also very difficult to remove from the bar when all devices are not working. We have two locking devices that are designed to be released under the power of servo motors. Unfortunely, during the NH regional, the servos didn't work, and we couldn't remove the locking devices. We had a backup system of strings that could manually release the locking devices, but we also ran into trouble with this. The referees ended up lowering the bar to almost chest level, and we still had trouble removing our robot. However, we then fixed the problem shortly after that match and didn't have any problems with it throughout the day. How long did it take to remove the robot off the bar the time the servos weren't working? What would you say if i said that it took upwards of 5 minutes.....