[Peter Matteson]

Originally Posted by AcesJames

Funny to think 177 went from having an elevator that didn't go up and down and no minibot at all at Shakedown, to one of the fastest tube scoring and minibot launching teams in the world at St Louis.

To be honest the elevator worked but it was so fast and the limit switches weren't working so we just didn't use it and acted like it didn't work.

As for the mini-bot we didn't want to tip our hand at the scrimmage and give everone a jump on copying our design by week 1. In the end we scrapped the design we had at the time, and in the week leading to WPI we got our sheetmetal minbot working. Also our last minbot we used at the campionship was in final configuration on Friday afternoon at championship

Originally Posted by Madison

Are you able to join the flat urethane belting without using whatever special kit McMaster recommends? When we use round urethane belting, we just heat it over a heat gun and mash the malleable ends together, then grind the flashing off. This is very easy and doesn't require anything particularly expensive.

I'd like to play around with the flat belts some, though, if they're similarly easy to work with.

Did you just let the belts wander back and forth on the drums? Any problems with them riding up on one another?

All good questions:
We have done the same thing with round belts for years and the flat belt is very similar. With some practice you get it almost perfect without the tools.

We actually just let the belts ride around on the drums they would wander abit but we also after a short time figured out how each belt wanted to walk and used it to our advantage to place them. They would occasionally pile up and need to be straightened out but it was never and issue because they still always grabbed the tubes.

Originally Posted by V_Chip

This robot can also do pullups.

(CT Regional Reference)

We actually looked for the field we did that on at championships because one of the pegs was deformed by that event...