pic: Team 256 presents our offseason robot: Stockade

[the.miler]

How's this project going? Some students on our team were looking at the bots going to Madtown and it reminded me of Stockade. Will we see this at Madtown?

My thoughts on the 10 pt. hanger: Having cylinders that pivoted (but defaulted to one location with bungee cord) worked out well for us at CalGames. That flexibility allowed us to roll up to the pyramid fast, see the hooks depress a couple of inches in contact with the bar, and know that our hook engagement is good and our robot is going to get off the ground. Don't have any good pictures accessible right now, but there are plenty of similar systems out there. Team 2590 churned out something nice: http://frc2590.org/team-info/robots/518-athena.html

A rigid system makes it so that if your robot pushes up really hard against the bar, and your robot falls back after that initial push an inch or so (could easily happen if your driver releases the throttle because he is, say, afraid of bending the climber cylinders), you could miss the hang if your hooks can't tolerate that misalignment. That being said, plenty of teams made it work with large hooks, better support (like 254's bearings) and/or just really drilling their drivers.

We just found making a flexible pivoting mount and putting in bungee cords to be the best solution for our team; whatever works better for you is best of course.