Chief Delphi - View Single Post

Ken Streeter · #13 13-03-2008, 12:11

Quote:

Originally Posted by Qbranch

Quote:

Originally Posted by Tapoore

Funny story: this year, our hurdle bot weighed only 87 lbs when we got to the competition. We decided to add some weight to get it closer to 120lbs using a couple of dumbbells. We figured that the easiest way to "secure" them would be to use zipties. We put two dumbbells in the front and one in the back near to our electronics board. During our final qualification match, we slammed into the alliance wall pretty fast and the dumbbell came loose and unplugged all of our motor connections! Ooops...

As a quick aside:
Have you tried running your robot without the extra weight? Since there isn't as much defense this year, you may gain critical extra performance from your robot's drive system.

We ran our hurdling configuration all day on Thursday and Friday without the extra weight. (In hopes that our other configuration could be added on Saturday if we received permission to do so from the GDC.) We found that our robot was a little tippy in a situation we hadn't anticipated -- when carrying a trackball and then bumping up sideways against a trackball which was wedged against the side wall, the two trackballs would smoosh together, storing up energy which would then rebound and flip our robot over onto its side. Amazingly, this happened not just once, but twice in qualifying rounds while driving around the field with a trackball while the arm (and the trackball) where in the "stowed" position!)