Here's mine.....
This is like 2 days before the bot had to be shipped, I was working on the bot in a garage....Started at about 9am that day - this is a saturday (as if that matters) - and a team in our area was holding a 'practice' at their school...They had the carpet, the goals, and controller stuff and everything...was really good....Cept there were no 7 foot walls...just a table...but the balls werent really any issue, just testing the robot.
Anyway, my job from 9am to 2pm (when the practice was) was to get about 15 pounds off of the bot. So, I got my little cardboard box to collect all my weight reductions...So I was working away, taking off extruded alminum here and there, cutting things smaller, replacing steel with aluminium...Got 15 pounds off, so we were good to go. Time to throw the bot into the car and head over to the school for the games.
So, I get the the school (note I am the ONLY person from school there)...There are like 6 teams there from the Toronto area, we're all showing our bots off and weighing them with a majical triple beam balance.
So, weigh the thing....127lbs...Good stuff.
Then it's time to set up the bot for the match...All is going well, I'm in a good mood....The match starts, I run out - or at least the bot does - and grabs a goal like its suppose to....But then it DIES COMPLETELY!!!! *i freak out* lol
Then another team comes out and tries to grab the goal from my dead bot...They couldnt...
So then like all 4 bots on the field come to the goal I'm stuck on...in all their fighting for it the whole set of things goes into a wall. Guess what bot was between the wall and the goal? Yep, mine.
So now the match is over...I go over to my bot to see what happened...
1. I notice a few things.... it died cause the connector for the ground on the battery came off.
2. Our 'Claw' (look in the robots 2002 there are pics of it...its our goal grabber) was completely screwed up. One of them had a huge dent in it, the other one had somehow been pushing all the way back into the robot - this isn't possible. Then I notice this happened cause the pnumatic sylinder it was on was broken (how do u break those things?) and one of its supports on bot had been majorly moved out of place.
3. The secondary drive on the bot (we have our outer wheel drive, and then the inner one on drill motors for extra pulling pushing power)...So the drill ones, the chains on both of them had popped off...I discovered later this was because the drive shaft the wheels were on MOVED.
So, get the bot, run out of the school, floor it back to the garage i was working in and time to get fixing it...
A couple friends of mine who also saw all the damge the bot took came to help as well...Fraser (from University of Toronto) and Ian (who was a mentor for team 188) came back...
I also gave our coach/mentor a call....Figure he should be up-to-date with what happened...
He comes over as well to help out as well (he lives like an hour away)...
Se we were all there till about 10...then Fraser left...me, ian, and robb were there working till 3am...Got everything fixed...Improved some stuff so that non of these things would happen again....And they never did
So...That was my worst, as well as probably best, building experence...
Then we get to the compettion and one of our drill motot transmission keeps gridning itself all to heck...Long story short we kinda fixed it...But not entirely...It still gridnded from time to time, but it worked well enough.
If you want to see pics of our bot, go here:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/pi...rrow=4&trows=3
You can hit next two times after that pic to see 2 other pics of our bot...
Now, thats quite enough for this post...lol