Innovative and Unusual Robotics

[John Gutmann]

The other day i wanted to go to the mall but first my mom had an interview at Office Max. SO i wandered around the store for 40 minutes, and with being in robotics i relaized that you can make a really sofisticated robot from materials in an office supply store. well everything except the controller, so i was wondering what other teams or people did that was using something in a different way or used something unusual in a robot they have made, or anything of the sort

[sanddrag]

I'm curious as to what you found in office max to use for drive motors.

[RogerR]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

I'm curious as to what you found in office max to use for drive motors.

maybe the motor(s) from a printer, shredder, or scanner?

[BrianBSL]

Originally Posted by RogerR

maybe the motor(s) from a printer, shredder, or scanner?

IIRC, you used to get a dot-matirx printer in the kit for parts.

[John Gutmann]

Originally Posted by BrianBSL

IIRC, you used to get a dot-matirx printer in the kit for parts.

in what years because i never knew about that

[Billfred]

I'm not sure of the exact years, but it was very early FIRST--1992 through 1995ish?

[John Gutmann]

wow way b4 my time

[AmyPrib]

Yes, I seem to recall some footage from 92-93 timeframe where someone pulled a typewriter (or something similar) out of the kit of parts, among various other objects.

[John Gutmann]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

I'm curious as to what you found in office max to use for drive motors.

you could use motors from anything, i would say a pencil sharpener would be good because it would be easier to adapt a wheel to it

[Jack Jones]

We made cord reels out of stuff from Home Depot to feed power to the FP motors on our lift mechanism - maybe you saw them at Rah Cha Cha.

We pulled out the slip rings from a pair of 14/3 triple tap power cord reels and put them into the PVC cases from clothes line reels, which we wound with speaker wire. They lasted us through 72 matches and who knows how many hours of practice, but they were starting to fail in Rochester. Not sure whether is was old age or the abuse they took at the YES! Exposition, where we let kids drive it and they persisted in trying to lift immovable objects. We expect the post mortem inspection will show burn spots on the slip rings - but what the hay, it was worth it to give the YES! visitors a taste.

[mechanicalbrain]

I used wire coils from a bunch of hard drive to make a medium power electromagnet. I was inspired when my friend made a rail gun for a school project but nothing ever came of my tinkering. Lets see..... um..... oh yeah! I made an external wireless antenna for my computer out of paper clips and a Popsicle stick.

[John Gutmann]

Originally Posted by mechanicalbrain

I used wire coils from a bunch of hard drive to make a medium power electromagnet. I was inspired when my friend made a rail gun for a school project but nothing ever came of my tinkering. Lets see..... um..... oh yeah! I made an external wireless antenna for my computer out of paper clips and a Popsicle stick.

haha niice.

[Cuog]

I've always wanted to try and get the recycled handheld devices they always have at those stores(oh what i could build with a few old PDAs and sonehobby motors.

But for inovative stuff our team is building a robotic dolly with numerous attachements. We are going to use the camera that FIRST gave in the KOP to have a turret with a marshmelow gun auto aim at colors, and there may be GPS tranking equiped depending on if our school will give us one of the old laptops they dont use anymore. Plus a webcam attached to that computer which will have basic controls over the drive motors so we can drive it wirelessly via an ad-hoc network.