My vote for "best ball collecting device of 2002" would have to go to 95, hands down. Sure, there were other great teams out there, but I haven't seen a team yet that could pick up balls as well as these guys..I want to give an honorable mention to 45, because I still can't believe they got their method of collecting balls to work. If I were the one trying to tweak that program, I would have FAILED!

95. Nuff' Said

95 was the best!!! The "popcorn popper" design rocked!!
I saw them for the first time during the Quincy mini scrimmage and they rocked. They had the motors geared a little too high at first though and just shot all the balls right up and out of the hopper but then they finally got it down to a nice RPM to handle the balls very efficiently!!
You guys rocked!!!

If you don't say 95 its cause you haven't seen them. They are simply amazing! The only downfall i saw of theirs was that they filled the goal TOO MUCH and couldn't get all the balls out of their basket!

we are no grasshopper (you guys rocked with that popcorn popper, i was impressed back in quincy)...... but we did average more than 20 balls per match

Our robot, NAIA III, had a solid collection and a ball launching system that allowed it to continually pick up and shoot balls into the goal.

Please visit our site and take a look. We have some video clips of the robot in action. The Hawaii 5-0 theme song is pretty good too.

Re: dont forget team 95
 

Re: dont forget team 95
 

Team 95 had the most impressive ball collecting device i saw. I can't wait to see them again May 18th.

utc
 

that was taking at utc.

I didn't get to see Team 95 compete but the video IS impressive!

MIke Rush
Team 64

Those Grasshoppers at 95...
 

95 definitely had the best ball collecting system. They just moseyed on over to the balls on the side and they were all in the collection bin, ready for dump. Solid as a rock and untippable, unlike a few notably top-heavy and quite tipsy bots, including BUZZ, which had an elaborate high-dump mechanism. 95 was definitely the team to be allied with. Heck, I'm proud to say that I had the pleasure of being on a qualifying alliance with team 95, and I hope to see you all at the J&J next year.

Re: Re: dont forget team 95
 

HOW THE *$%# DID YOU DO THAT? THAT WAS AWESOME!

:cool: I definitely think that Chief Delphi, team 47, had one of the best ball mechanisms. I loved to watch it when it dumps balls, because it has to shake and shimmy! :)

from what i have learn
 

from what i have learn is that the rollers are driven by the price motor and belt driven heres a photo of the rollers the only one i have right now.

Best rookie ball machine
 

There were some amazing ball machines out there. Out here on the west coast, we didn't see that many, but at the Championships, we were very impressed.

We are a rookie team and, at the risk of being immodest, I think we had the best rookie ball machine. (We won the Rookie All-Star Award at the Los Angeles Regional.) If you know of any other good rookie ball machines, please post the info.

Below is the link to a short clip of our robot picking up 9 balls (which is all we could find at our school) in 3 seconds. We could handle about 16 in actual competition. If we picked up more, our pneumatics needed some robot shaking to help get the basket up.

Our major weak point was probably speed. We were nervous about changing to high gear because sudden turns tended to blow fuses, so we stayed in low gear. Hey, next year, we are going to ...

By the way, we competed against Team 86 and Team 1 in the Einstein Division match 64, and Team 86 was awesome at getting balls. Their alliance had us beat but decided to go for 2 more balls. Then for some reason, they didn't make it back to their home zone, and we won 43 to 42. So to Team 86, you guys deserved that one. (Of course we gave one away ourselves by not just raising our basket again to dump a ball that stayed in our basket. We lost by ... one ball, and would have won the tie if we had dumped that ball. Live and learn. Yes I know, I posted about that before but ...)

Short Clip: http://home.pacbell.net/pinewood/mov...DayShortSm.mov