keeeping older robots???
 

How do teams that have been in this for a couple of years deal with pas year robots-

our 1st year was 2000 and we took that robot apart because it gave its all duirng a post season runabout and went to the junkyard in the sky


what do teams do with their old robots??


dahl
497

Most of our "ancient" robots were stripped for parts, down to the very frame, which remains in our Practice Facility for now.

Rambots bots
 

Our robot.....hmmm our last year robot is in a storage room in our school basement with all these junk our school keeps. I guess our school thinks our robot is junk.

Jeff Wong

Hard Goodbyes...
 

Its so hard to "scrap" past year robots... :(

We work so hard for 6 weeks to design and build the thing. Then we try our best to win with it. And at the end of the season we say, "thanks for the memories... good bye".

It is for the greater good though, next year's robot needs this year's "brain". At least part of the robot will always lives on. :)

Steve Prairie
RAGE 173

R.I.P "Hanging Dragon" - 2000

Sea Dawg 'bots...
 

We keep our old robots intact after the competitions, but we don't do anything with them. They just collect dust and serve as reminders of how stupid we were in our first couple years :)

Old Bots = practice bots
 

At least once in the 3 years that I have been doing this, team 177 has fired up every machine from '96 on for prototyping, driver training or sparring. This year we constructed a practice machine from the base of the '97 machine, the arm from the '98 machine, and part of the end-effector from the '99 machine. You can see it behind our twin machine in the included picture.

P.J.

We took apart our 98 and 99 robots for scrap. The 97 robot is probably in storage somewhere at JPL, at least that was the last I heard about it.

We saved last year's robot and practiced balancing with it for a few weeks, until we killed the drive system. We decided it wasn't worth fixing, so the robot is basically dead. :(

We scrapped parts from our first robot. But after that, we keep the old ones around for practice, and as a reminder to the past for us, and to show the newcomers where we came from.

TechnoKat Museum
 

We have a Technokat "Museum" of robots from the past years. They are all lined up right at the enterance of our shop. Also we use some of them for testing.


Clark

;)

Spike's fate
 

Until this year, the previous year's robot was scrapped and scavenged for parts. But Spike 3 (last year's robot) did so well (winning both the Mid-Atlantic Regional and the Philadelphia Alliance Regional) that no one wanted to scrap it. So Spike 3 lives on, and just yesterday we demonstrated both Spike 3 and Spike 4. And I got to drive for a while. :D

Hey, this edit feature is fun!

RE: Keeping Older Robots
 

Well,

I can say from expirence that I wish that our team had kept our robots intact. Of course I know that nobody every uses old robot parts for the current robot cuz that would just be against the rules. However, for various reasons, our 1996 robot got dismantled. It was never returned to it's full glory and working state..right now it is mearly a display piece in FIRST Place...and I doubt as if it will ever be in the hands of a Blue Lightning team member again. While I do like the fact that it is being honored in FIRST Place...the only way u'd ever know it's story is if someone who knew it were there to tell you. So I hope that teams out there who have championship robots will keep them intact, and perhaps even find a place of honor for them. I admire the teams who have like thier last 7 robots functioning, or @ least still physically intact and lined up on thier practice field...I think that is very cool. Alas though Hexcalibur is but a mere memory now...that can be visited @ FIRST Place.

-Justin

When I was still with 69, I saw most of our old bots stripped to give life to the new prototypes of the upcoming season. Sometimes they made it back mostly together, but they always looked like a mess from their former glory. This one, the 1998 (my baby!) took the brunt of the dismemberment to give life to the 1999 "Trashcan".



1998 Boston Museum of Science Demonstration

TRASHCAN?!?

How could you call Sharpie 2000 a "trashcan"???

Matt --- the 1998 bot was torn apart more than the rest. The 1999 (the year right after 1998...) was the year of the "trashcan on treads" ... I mean really..that's what it looked like, and what even the engineers called it!



"The Trashcan on Treads - 1999 (Sharpie II)"

We were good with the floppies though :)

~ lora

What we do
 

Well, we've been a mixed bag.

1996, We have the main front panel remaining.

1997 is still in it's final form from 1997's Rumble at the Rock. Many pieces. (a harder fought second place I have yet to see, we came with a robot, and left with 3 very large peices)

1998 was dismantled to help prototype 1999. Only the side panels remain.

1999 is pretty close to final form, minus a brains.

2000 is in final form, and was used to spar against 2001

2001 is now on the lecture circuit, milking the school system for new team member before they even hit High School.

The robots, and what's left of them, are at a new room that our team secured from a closed school in our school system. I'm thinking it's our new build room.

Actually, we were requested if we could donate 1999 to First place about 2 years ago. I wonder if the offer is still open, Because the current team members feel we should have.

PS, this is my first post also

In 237's short life span...
 

Our 1999 robot is over at Naugatuck Valley Community College being reverse engineered by the CAD students...we went to go check on their progress at one point, and they had put the scissor mechanism into the computer (this lifted the hopper of floppies)...it was really spiffy to see it go up & down on the computer.

The 2000 robot, dubbed by one of the mechanical students "Its my baby" (after its UTC win) is sitting in storage where we built this year, which was actually an old business that made carnival games (with its specialty, Rock-em, sock-em robots ;) ), among other things. From what I know, the thing is still intact, minus a few speed controllers.

The 2001 robot is in the presentation circuit for the moment (yet we're not really explaining the game to the people we present to to save confusion)...we just did a promo at Cheshire HS in Cheshire, CT, who from what I can tell will be a very blessed team from the get-go (the school board loves them, they have teachers involved & seed money, and their principal used to be principal in South Windsor, where 177 resides.....this is much more than we ever had)

Thats all for now, wow...that was a long post.

Old Robots...
 

We have kept most of our robots intact. Buzz's 1 & 2 are gone but Buzz 3-6 are still in our Robot room at school. It's always fun to look at the old robots and see what we can do to improve upon a previous idea!! :D

We're starting now
 

It was hard letting go of our first robot (The Steel Falcon '99) beacause naturally it was our first robot. We just ran out of storage space for it. But last years robot (POS '00) was a different story. All that robot did was cause us trouble and hardships. I was pleased when I personally Destroyed it. I don't think we will ever get rid of our robot from this year (The Beefeater '01) because it is the first robot that we have had success with. After placing 3rd, 1st, 2nd, winning 2 Delphi awards, 1 judges award, and 1 leadership in controll award, I thought that we should keep this thing around for a while

We have keep our last three robots togather but the first year we where in first we scrape it. (':(')
And if we do need parts we try to take things that are not going to be used on that robot and use them.

Ack!!! Sorry, I had the 2000 robot in mind when you said "trashcan". I understand what you mean by that now. Sorry for the misunderstanding.

We still have most of the successful robots. Basically, we still have the '96 (Nat'l Champs) and '98 robots (Most Photogenic). The only good one that we no longer have is the '95 robot (7th place I believe). '97 got mostly dismantled this year but it wasn't much to look at to begin with. As far as '93 and '94 go I have no idea. They may still be with Kodak as far as I know (as in I have no idea whatsoever).

Matt

Lecture circuit... That's funny...
anyways, before the '99 bot things got scrapped for prototype parts and platforms... the ones waaaay before that used to sit in the corner... definitely a junkyard if there ever was one...

the 1999 gompei was put through its paces and some motors were probably pulled at some point in the course of testing for 2000... its in almost one piece though... 2000 is intact... still runs i'm sure and 01 is definitely on the "lecture circuit"

Our high school is moving to a new facility so we'll probably take our old bots there and start the Team 190 Museum...

Re: In 237's short life span...
 

Yep, our old principal really liked the FIRST program... it was kind of upsetting that he had to leave, since we had a real nice link to the administration... oh well, i think we've convinced our new principal to like us too :)

As for the older bots... i know that we have our bots from 96, 97 was re-arranged to allow for practice for this years game. our 98 machine is still together, with the exception of the arm, which we stole to use on the 97 machine for practice... out 99 machine is still fully together (minus an end effector which we stole for the 97 practice bot) our 2000 machine is still fully together...

BTW: we commonly call our 97 machine "frankie", short for frankenstein... this thing is probably the ugliest machine you will ever see, if you see PJ's post on the previous page of this thread.. you can see a picture of it...

k, i'm done rambling :)

Tom Schindler
Team 177

Our team doesn't have any one big sponser, so we have to do a lot of demo's to keep the money flowing. So we keep Grace (last years bot) more or less in shape for these little exhibits. Even so, the team loves her so much no one would stand to see her scrapped. Grace is going to be around for quite a while...

-Andy

older robots
 

we scrap parts off our old robot and use them for projects and such... like this year we are using previous year's parts for our cart

The Rambot Goodbye
 

Spending many hours on last year robot and the bot before that, I find it hard to have to disassemble it.

This year however, we're planning to use its parts. :/ So bye bot 2000 and 2001.

-anton

TOBOR...
 

Lessee... TOBOR I ('98) was disassembled and is now sitting in a few people's closets. TOBOR II ('99) is being used as a protoype for this year! ;) TOBOR III ('00) runs beautifully and is sitting in the corner and TOBOR IV ('01) is propped up against a filing cabinet (If you saw T4 last year, you'll know what I mean!!)

- Katie

Our 2000 and 2001 robots are still functional and sitting in the corner of our teacher's room (1 in the crate and one on top). Sadly, our 98 and 99 robots were disassembled at the end of last year. We were moving to a new building and they wer nonfunctional, so we scrapped them to save space and gain a few spare parts.

Interesting lineage of Bot here:

98 (first year for us) - Dumpster somewhere in Oxford, CT

99 - My house's basement (rather than a Dumpster, I couldn't bear to see it go to waste)

2000 - My Office at school (student employee) - to be played with when i'm far too lazy to do homework, although a strictly fisher price based drive train does'nt do much for power- Only robot in my posession with a complete contol system :D

2001 - Our Team's current workspace, never to be scrapped or thrown away based on last year's phenomenal success.

2002- Cocktail napkins covered in aluminum dust and tap magic.

Team 25's robots work on....
 

The Raider Robotix machines live on in various states

Our 97,98 and 99 robots were dismantled and largely disposed of. Parts of them grace our display cases in our science department as a memento to those seasons.

The 2000 robot "Cradle Robber" and the 2001 machine "Robo Kong" are still in great shape and we use them to make appearances all over the place. Just last week the machines introduced FIRST to an auditorium of Jr. High students at a state sponsored conference and today they were featured in the local paper. They are also training our latest generation of drivers in how to deal with 180 lb goals and balls.

We have a walk in storage closet in the back of our work area where we store them and our gear. I figure we can fit two more machines in there before we have to start stacking. The GOALS are the big problem. We cut one down to a ball storage bin and another is now a rolling work table/dolly. This year's goals will probably be used as disco dance cages or something!

We need a trailer.....

WC:D