Quote:
Originally Posted by jvriezen
Here's our Minne-Mini story.
Wednesday morning: we were informed a team had cancelled and we had an opportunity to go. Our bot was partially disassembled to repair some mecanum rollers. Recruited 9 students and five mentors to go.
Wednesday night, --reassembly
Thursday night, driver practice, and broke a another mecanum roller (or two?) -- fixed it using a slightly less time consuming disassembly approach even though everyone would have rather gone home by then.
Packing stuff-- bring spare rollers? Fixing would take too long, so we'd never use them, but throw them in the box any way.
Match one: Broke a roller, started to make same disassemble/fix but given time of match two, we realized we wouldn't make it but we could re-assemble and make the match without the roller.
Match two, lost another roller on opposite wheel.
Match three, lost two more rollers, started doing carpet damage, now we had no choice.
A crowd of kids with some extra borrowed tools (drill, riveter) to get more hands working. Disassembled both the left and right side of the bot to replace rollers. Missed two matches, and lost one more roller.. .
We had a couple of other repairs as well, one fixed with velcro cable ties and zipties, which held up in the last match.
At the end of the day we had kids doing line dances and all said they had a great day, despite finishing 33rd.
That's what I love about FIRST.
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After this year, I would personally never buy
this style of mecanum wheels (single plastic plate holding the rollers on) for FRC. I'm not sure if there are
any robots out there that used that style and kept all of the rollers. I've picked up a handful of those rollers with the plastic snapped off at every event I have been at.
It looks like they have updated the wheels for 2015 with additional support though, so that's a good sign.
2052 has always used
AndyMark's mecanum wheels, which have two metal plates holding the rollers on. We have never had a problem with the rollers breaking off.