Anyone else with a really bad robot?

[Iain]

Originally posted by Lord Nerdlinger
Our team is composed of 11 high school kids, no mentors, no college kids, etc. This is our first year, and the only real reason we have a team going is b/c we got lucky with some funding. Anyway, I finished the drive system today (almost) and our robot moves, but it's loud, shaky, covered in grease, stuff falls off, it's just all around terrible. We have nothing else on our robot except for the wheels, and the motors. Which we ran for a while, didn't realize they were getting so hot, and actually melted the wire onto the frame

Please give us hope :-)

That's easy enough.

Our team is in practically the same shape - 11 seniors with a couple of teachers and our parents. We're extraordinarily lucky in that our teacher knows a guy who welds Battlebots together (he did the frame of the one that killed Ziggo in the most recent season) and one of our team member's fathers is a master electrician, so our wiring is ultra-neat.

And in spite of that, our robot isn't even to the "moving" point yet. We're getting there, but not quite. And when we finally test it for the first time I fully expect our drill motors to explode or melt or something because no one on our team knew about all the technical problems they tend to encounter before mounting them (it was practically the first thing we did) and now it's too late to change things without practically tearing the bot apart. Fun.