2011, Logo Motion, was our rookie year. At the time we had, two mentors with not much machining ability, equipment, work location or experience in large scale robotics. We have done underwater robotics (MATE) the year before which was our first year as a robotics team. Our under water robot was made out of PVC so custom metal fabricating was never even considered. After building our KOP frame and getting the drive train running, which took more time then we ever imagined. Not having a programming mentor, we all had to learn Labview together as best as we could which added more delays. We then moved on to the scoring arm. With a very limited budget, we had to make the Robotics Organizing Committee and Ace Hardware’s generous grant go as far as possible. Thanks ROC and ACE! Most of which we had to reserve for travel and accommodation expenses. With extremely limited machining capability here on the big island of Hawaii we had to resort to out of the box manufacturing and parts supplies. We ended up stripping parts from cars at the schools auto shop program to create our scoring system. This helped us gain our third mentor. We recruited the teacher from the auto tech class, more like he recruited himself. We ended up using a flywheel as our rotational arm base and cut out window motors from car doors to actuate our lift and claw. We ran out of time and we were not able to tackle the pole climbing mini robot. Since this was our first time we figured that what we had finished was going to have to be good enough.
At the first day of competition during inspection we were informed that the window motors we used on our claw and lift system were not legal. We had to remove the offending motors and compete without them. Over the course of two days we were able to adapt some donated motors, from a generous FRC pit volunteer, who just so happened to have a few. I sure thought that was odd at the time.
During the first day, practice matches, and most of the second day, qualifications, the pit crew with our new auto tech mentor rebuilt the claw and lift system to fit the new motors. Thankfully there was an onsite machine shop that made a world of difference! Thanks for being there, the BAE machine shop workers were exceptional. We were able to have a functioning scoring system for our last 3 matches and were able to actually score.
What a relief!
During most of the competition we had no other option but to play defense. And play it well we must of.
We were selected on the third pick by the first seed alliance.
We went on to receive the General Motors Industrial Design Award and the Hawaii Regional Tournament Champions!
So much help was offered and given that I cannot express our thanks enough.
FRC is such a great community to be part of.
Not quite as nightmarish as 801 & 1502 this year. But to us, as the small fish rookie team in the big pond of FIRST, we sure thought it was.
Of course the next year the window motors we used we added as legal motors, even with coupons to get from local auto recyclers.
Go figure….
