pic: How 1251 shipped.
 

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Don't worry guys...This isn't the end of it!!! :D

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*grabs drill* I'm sure I can help you guys take 40lbs of speedholes out. :rolleyes:

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Adam, we lost the weight. Now we need to rework a few things. 1251 isn't giving up we feel that we will have a competitive bot ready to go for Friday's qualifying matches at UCF. Some things about the bot frame is 1/8in Ll bracket aluminum, two speed shifting gearbox with bike and CIM motors, and picks up balls off the ground. At any rate still a work in progress.

Weight loss king,
-Drew

P.S. my team learned a very valuable lesson about KISS this year.

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If you are ok with the 10 point scoring uber defensive robot, awesome.
If you want to get back to your original design (which I happen to like, a lot):
Get rid of the double middle wheel set up, get out that drill ( you can literally save 10 pounds on that machine), and see if you can make your shooter a one wheel setup. I bet you could gain full robot functionality if you did that. Its just the time you have at the regional to do the work....


good luck :)

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This looks nice guys, I can tell you cut a lot away. I wanna see the whole thing! I agree with taking out one of the double wheels and dump the compressor if you can, get that shooter back on and you'll be rockin. Nice looking machine though guys. Lemme know if we can help you out any.
Dan

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YIKES!

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I hope you dont think im trying to design your robot with this idea, but how about.

1) Dropping those facy transmissions for a KOP gearbox (they're really nice for a straight drivetrain)
2) since you wont need to shift gears anymore, drop that hefty little compressor.
3)Feel free to eliminate a wheel off the center if you can.
4)got freshmen? speedholes not included, but you can throw a thousand or so on there.
5) One wheeled shooters work just fine, ours has been doing great

IF you keep your robot how it is, best of luck (I personally love dumper bots), but i think a bigger, less beefy hopper might be in order if you arent shooting balls.

Just one (almost) freshman's perspective, and i hope your reconstruction goes well (my team rebuilt the robot at 2 regionals last year, and we ended up with a nice machine.)

Best Wishes,
Rich Ross

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Is that size 35 chain I see? You could always swap everything not attached to the gearbox to 25, that'll save weight. Also, a ton of cheeseholing can be done. I'm sure you guys can get your shooter back on.

By the way, I love the color! Is that powdercoating i spy?

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Good luck guys. We have some work to do at UCF still as well. If nothing else, you'll be one heck of a defense bot... but I have a feeling you won't settle for anything less than what you originally dreamed.

By the way- don't forget to take that ball out of the system; lose a pound or so :p

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Are those custom plastic wheels? Did you machine them? They must have cost a fortune.

Anyway, why double wheels in the center?

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It's a great looking robot, and I agree that that is a great color... nice to see a little differential from silver aluminum... But as far as getting the weight off and getting it reassembled... Where there's a will, there's a way. We had somewhat of the same issue with shipping very overweight last year and this year we ran into the same problem... Just work hard, work fast, and you'll be allright.

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If I'm not running around like a chicken with my head cut off and you've got an extra drill at UCF, grab me. I'm sure that there are plenty of people that would love to help you work on getting the weight out've that structure to get it back to it's initial design. You guys have put together great work in the past, and like you said, it's just another lesson. I know that 108 went through it last year and they ended up getting their design functioning again. Either way, even without the shooter that's an excellent and very robust design.

In the end, I definitly understand how it feels even if you can't put the shooter on. That's what happened with us in week 4, except that we scrapped the shooter mostly due to not having any sort of machining capabilities. Our design came out and has the same things going for it as yours now, and the more I've thought about it since then, you really have a world of oppurtunities even without the shooter. That would just be a cherry on top. Great job guys, keep your heads up, because you're guaranteed to kick butt either way. :)

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P.S. Do you really need that compressor? If you're just using the air to run the shifting cylinders, you can scrap it. If you're using the AndyMarks like we are, you can get well over 100 shifts while staying above pressure. :)

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The brand of your transmission has absolutely nothing to do with the number of times you can shift it before your air runs out. Anyhow, what pressure are you shifting at? Last year, we shifted at about 45 PSI and got 12 shifts out of one tank. How can you get well over 100? You must have been shifting at a low pressure. We started at about 100 psi in the tank, took 12 shifts, and ended under just 45. But anyway, 12 shifts is shifting once every 10 seconds. So, if shifting is your only pneumatics, you can probably get by with one tank.

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I mentioned the transmission because we used the AndyMarks which means you just need to use the 1/2" cylinders. If they did custom ones they might need larger which wouldn't work as well. If you check for air leaks and pump the PSI to the amount allowed it should last for a good number of shifts.

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There is alot of aluminium support structure you can take out of there and still retain structural integrity. We dropped about 20 lbs just losing extra aluminium bars. Just think minimalisticaly.

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I'd second what everyone else is saying. If you're only using pneumatics to shift the trannies, ditch the compressor, and precharge one accumulator before the match. We're getting ~50 shifts off of one accumulator, regulated down to 20 PSI.

Someone suggested taking off the AndyMarks in favor of the kit gearbox. I don't know how much one of their current transmissions weighs, but I'm pretty sure an AndyMark is less than a KOP gearbox.

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The transmissions use a 1in stroke piston, which is larger then the Andy marks use .75in inch stroke I believe. The wheels for Sanddrag's information are uhmw and were very cheap to make thanks to our machining facilities, they were done with a CNC mill and we just bought the stock which ran under $200.

-Drew

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Might want to check the specs on the pneumatic valves - I think they are rated for a minimum pressure of 30psi? Maybe it was only the big valve but its something to look into.

If the valve only switches half way all the air in your tank will leak out.

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What what I can see, you've got the an excellent design, you just need to get it together/skinnier!

When we get to Florida, just look for us and we'll be glad to help. Heck, we'll have plenty of people un-crating our machine, I'll come help ya'll out (maybe if theres a T-shirt involved j/k :-P).

my e-mail is jayw(AT)famview.com, if you think of anything, just shoot me a message.

cya at UCF,
~Jay

EDIT:

Just thought of something, could you ditch the compressor and just refill an air tank(s) in between matches?

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Maybe you guys could rebuild that structure using 1/16 wall aluminum, it looks thick in the picture.

You guys are a great team and I am sure you will be really competitive shooter or not.

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Here's some ideas for you:
- Replace the big CIMs with smalls ones - there's a few pounds right there (they have more torque too)
- Ditch the compressor and just pre-fill- thats about 6 pounds
- The big A-frame you've got going looks kind of unnecessary. You could probably make it much smaller.
- It looks like you have way more metal than you need on the hopper.
- Those are some incredibly massive transmission plates and mounts. Drill big holes in them.
- You can use much smaller chains. Ours are about half that size, and we've never had problems with breakage.
- You might have to ditch that machined nameplate on the front. It looks like it weighs about 10 pounds; at least use thinner material.
- It looks like all your square bar is 1/8" walled, and you can definitely get away with 1/16". It's probably a bit late to change that though.
- If you can, machine down the gears in the gearbox. By taking down the hub and putting a few holes in them, you can cut them down from about a pound each to about a third of a pound.
- Fill the air system with helium!!

- Edit: you can run the shooter with only one motor, with a chain to each wheel. We are running ours (same horizontal setup) with a single FP motor on a custom gearbox.

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Thanks to everyone who has given us advice so far.

As of right now we are a few pounds under!!(Sigh of relief)

As for the competition we plan to modify our hopper to hold A LOT more balls and we will be keeping the large bike motor in the gearbox so we can remain to be a strong defensive robot.

Thanks again for all the support.

The TechTigers

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Hey- Dont worrry, you arent the only team in this situation (we shipped with a robot that would be expected in the middle of week 5, at best...). An excellent way we found to cut weight was to replace our heavier box and extruded aluminum with (i think it was 1/8" wall) inch box aluminum with a 3/8" speedhole ~ every 3/4"(on all 4 faces). We used our drillpress, took an hour to do all the pieces we needed; just look at where you will need to attach and dont speedhole there, because you will need to throughbolt. This brought the weight down to about .1lbs/foot for material that wont be taking a beating (hopper frame, stuff inside your 'bot profile, etc...)- heck, it's even pretty strong- I am about 240-250lbs, and I held a 3 ft length of speedholed box at an angle on the ground and stood on it, so it was supporting all my weight and being levered against my foot, and it took me about 5 mins of continuous pressure to get a relatively slight bend.

Good luck, and remember, if nothing else, defense is always useful!

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Thanks everyone for the support. Just to answer some questions and suggestions.

-The wheels are made out of UHMW and the came out to be about $12.00 each and about 1.5 hours of CNCing each one. Also each one weight just under half pound so taking the middle one out wouldn't make a big difference.

-The shooter can not come back on because of the way it was taken off, when we started "the diet" many welds were cutted and makes it impossible for some pieces to come back on.

-As shown in the picture (plus electronics, and storage tanks) the robot weights 109 lbs so we don't have the need to remove pneumatics. Also we will be using the air for a dump truck design.

-We are planing on putting a dump truck in the back of the robot at UCF and we think of cutting up the current hopper to suit our needs.

-Also the paint job looked great before the diet. :(


Thanks everyone for the support and we have tons of work for Thursday.

No matter what happens to the robot we learned our lesson and we had fun. That's what matters, we still think we can make this a very competitive robot but we were expecting to have a killer machine as you can see on the other pictures. Sometimes we have to go through rough things to become wiser and well as much as i don't like to cut our bot to pieces it was needed to learn our lesson. We are also proud of this robot because it was all student designed, student machined and student built.

Good Luck to every one.

Dave