pic: Team 1322 2009 Robot

[joeweber]

loading photo ...

[TheOtherGuy]

Amazing!

I hope you can get the balls out if the robot is disabled...?

Oh, am I blind, or are there just 2 drive wheels?

[maltz1881]

Yep we are using 2 drive wheels and we have a castor up front. Yes we can get the balls out without a problem!!

[AustinDpOwers89]

now by caster at the front you do mean a rover wheel on a caster right?
have you got guys practicing throwing moonrocks into ur robot? i'm just wondering how easy that is... getting balls to fall into the robot that are thrown from human players. other than that tho, looks pretty sweet.

[joeweber]

We are using a caster in the front which is legal for a non drive wheel. We have the drive wheels place so we could move them back and forth to find perfect ballance on the robot. Most of the weight of the robot is on the two drives and only about 10- 12 lbs on the caster. We were practicing for three hours on saturday (end of week five) and the balls thrown into the robot had no problem finding the tunel to the lift belts. Every thing worked great but we did have problems with balls that got broken, they would get stuck every once and a while at the bottom. We will resovle that problem. The shooter surpprised us today , it was shooting over 20 feet. Still trying to get the camera perfected.

In today's experience it looks like human playeres will play a big roll in the wins.

[GaryVoshol]

Originally Posted by joeweber

We are using a caster in the front which is legal for a non drive wheel.

Only if it's a caster built out of a rover wheel.

See
http://forums.usfirst.org/showthread.php?t=11255
http://forums.usfirst.org/showthread.php?t=11445
http://forums.usfirst.org/showthread.php?t=11784

[joeweber]

Thanks for the heads up on the casters, weeks ago when we decided to use them they were considered legal. Now like many other rules, they have been changing like the weather. We are trying to read the rules like FIRST requires ( do not lawyer them) and we have had to make many modifications to keep up but I wonder how many other teams are able to keep up with the lawyering that is going on. We have been doing this since 2000 and this has got to be the worst design rules we have ever seen.

[R.C.]

Originally Posted by joeweber

Thanks for the heads up on the casters, weeks ago when we decided to use them they were considered legal. Now like many other rules, they have been changing like the weather. We are trying to read the rules like FIRST requires ( do not lawyer them) and we have had to make many modifications to keep up but I wonder how many other teams are able to keep up with the lawyering that is going on. We have been doing this since 2000 and this has got to be the worst design rules we have ever seen.

Life is tough, rule changes make it tougher. But also what fun would the game be without complications.