Warning, Please Read!

[Andy Grady]

Hi all!

To all teams competing at the competitions comming up. At the Granite State Regional, our alliance on two occassions had controls fall to the ground during autonomous period due to autonomous robots slamming into the wall at full speed. In one of these rounds our partner broke their controls and made it very difficult for them to compete. I just want to warn everyone of this occurance and encourage you to figure some way of making your controls stick to the metal plate in the driver station in the case a robot hits it in autonomous mode.

Thank you,
Andy Grady

P.S. Congrats to teams 58, 236, and 175 for a great regional victory. It was very exciting and alot of fun. Also thank you to 176 and 213 for being excelent partners in the elims.

[evulish]

Any idea what would work best? Maybe some rubber grip stuff...or put a bit of diamond plating on the bottom of the controls to kinda 'latch'? Any suggestions?

[Ben Mitchell]

Thanks for the warning: we will definitly take it into consideration and make sure our countrols are weighed or latched down somehow.

[Josh Hambright]

Wow i totaly didn't even think about this happening but now i totaly could see it happening...

Last year i got racked when the wall got slammed by the thunderchickens at a competition last year. So i can see how this could be a problem.

Maybe just some drawer liners taped to the bottom would help.

[mav]

the best thing to hold your controls down with would be to put some double-side tape to hold them to the diamond plate

[Bduggan04]

Double sided tape isn't good because it gets dirty and I'm not sure it would take some of the hits our player's station took. It would be nice if FIRST put a big sheet of velcro (picking male or female as a standard) on the diamond plate so the control boards stuck really well.

[mav]

you would probably have to replace it after every match

[DanL]

We're putting Linotex or those rubber feet thingies down...

But since we're going to have a laptop there, now I'm thinking we might even want to go to suction cups...

[Josh Hambright]

instead of velcro you could use 3M dual lock, it has no male or female and it sticks AMAZINGLY well, and it doesn't wear out after repeated uses.

They send it in the field kit for the FLL competition, to attach the parts to the field mat, very cool stuff...

however we already have velcro on the bottom of our controls that holds the controls together after we fold the 2 halfs up for ease of carrying.

[Cory]

The best thing to do would be to put them on the ground under the diamond plate. This is what every team at Sacramento weas forced to do.

Cory

[Joe3]

Just keep a roll of duct tape with the controls and tape it down when you set it up.

[WernerNYK]

Originally posted by Cory
The best thing to do would be to put them on the ground under the diamond plate. This is what every team at Sacramento weas forced to do.

Does this mean that the drivers had to pick up the controls after autonomous was over? I dont see how this would be fair... it cuts into the 1:45 of human control time. If this was not the case, then how was this implemented?

[Josh Hambright]

if the controls were on the floor does that mean u had to pick them up and then plug in the competition port or was the competition port just long enough to reach?

We already have to plug in our wearable as soon as autono ends, if we have to set the controls on the floor its going to be even worse. There must be a better solution...maybe making autonomous code that doesn't hit the wall that hard (yes i know mistakes will be made but if its a constant problem then start disabling robots that hit the wall, its harsh but so is setting the controls on the floor)

[evulish]

Does anyone recall whether there is any kind of gap between the shelf and the wall? If so, you could get a piece of metal to shove into the crack so it wouldn't go flying back.

[Dave...]

If your controls will allow it, a pair of quick-grips or similar type of clamps would be fast to install and provide good security of your control system.

I would not recommend any type of tape, as any sticky residue left on the shelf will just accumulate and gum up over time. FIRST would surely intervene here.

Thanks, Andy, for the heads up advice!