Spray paint! (and camo bumpers!)
Last year, 1511 had a contact that offered to powdercoat parts for us, but it was a 4 hour round trip drive, and the process took a while. Our drivetrain got done, but in the rush to finish the rest of the robot, we didnt have time, so we tried metal spraypaint, and it
worked beautifully!
Flash forward to this year, and we again used
red & black spraypaint, and coupled that with a
crazy camo mesh hand painted by one of our mentors!
Version 2 of the robot was a metal mesh with some more
spray paint.
Its not quite as fancy or pretty as annodizing or powdercoating, but it works well to have a pretty distinguished, non-aluminum looking robot.