#teamtether club

[DanielPlotas]

Team 1984 had a Litter-manipulating tetherbot at the Greater Kansas City Regional.

[CalTran]

Originally Posted by DanielPlotas

Team 1984 had a Litter-manipulating tetherbot at the Greater Kansas City Regional.

That thing was adorable. Also at GKC, Team 1806, S.W.A.T. was part of #TeamTether via their HP tote ramp.

[Billfred]

4901 jumped on the bandwagon in Orlando with an unpowered ramp. Slightly jealous of 1523's cardboard box ramp, though.

[Rob3653]

Originally Posted by Billfred

4901 jumped on the bandwagon in Orlando with an unpowered ramp. Slightly jealous of 1523's cardboard box ramp, though.

3653 also built a ramp for Orlando. Only issue throughout the matches was the masons line getting caught in our wheels/axles. Having to remove our wheels after every match was torture.

[nikeairmancurry]

At the Woodhaven district event the following teams all had tethered tote ramps in eliminations.

1023

3604

469

280

[Sperkowsky]

We are in the process of developing an extremely light weight tether ramp design. Its going well.

[Vinh pham 4587]

Team 4587, Jersey Voltage, has a tether bot similar to 148's. For those who are wondering what to use to pass power through your tether. I used one paired 12 gauge wire to drive a cim, and a CAT 5 straight through cable for our sensors like a encoder and limit switch. I then used electrical tape and bundled the cables together every 6in. On each end of the tether we used Andy Anderson connectors, and had a Ethernet breakout board on both robots. All of this is encased inside mesh sleeving.

[Dunngeon]

Team 955 will be part of #teampassivetether at PNW Philomath next week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUi3I1mCQbo

[The other Gabe]

955 has released a practice video of themselves tethered to a passive ramp at the feeder, making them the first PNW teamtether bot that I know of

[Dominick Ferone]

Tech Valley had 195 303 and 5030 at the start and as the competition went on 3624 and 20 had joined as well as a few more i believe.

[azcalg]

Team 1212 will be going to the Arizona West regional with a tethered bot. And by tethered, we have two completely identical (minus the electronics) robots. Each robot has 7 different motors, two limit switches, and a camera so there's a massive cable running between the two of them. If I remember correctly our 20 foot cable weighs something like 8 pounds.

We're using corrugated wrap around sleeving that's held together with electrical tape as casing for the wires. The sleeving has held up really well despite our relatively inexperienced (myself included) drivers constantly driving over it. It's relatively easy to drive over but it's a rather large bump so it's definitely noticeable. The tape has begun to come undone in a few areas but a fresh new strip will easily fix that. My only problem with it is that over time it has developed some kinks that may prove difficult to undo and it doesn't stretch quite to 20 feet, more like 18, which may be because there's lots of wire but the sleeving certainly doesn't help. Would it be worth it to go through the effort of switching to mesh sleeving? How well has it held up for other teams?

I'll try to post pictures or maybe a release video if we manage to make one in the next couple weeks. We still aren't quite done making minor adjustments and we haven't practiced a whole lot... it's going to be a very stressful Thursday making all the changes.

[Ryan Dognaux]

4329 joined #teamtether this past weekend. We created a fairly lightweight ramp out of 1/16" thick L-angle and a few pieces of sheet metal. It at least doubled our tote stacking speed and allowed us to create at least a capped 6 stack in almost every match that we used it -





To my knowledge we were the only ones at St. Louis trying this and we never had any entanglement issues since we would just stay in the corner with our ramp the whole match.

For champs we are working on making the ramp start folded up and have it fold down in order to not interfere with teams that have a 3 tote autonomous.

[Kevin Leonard]

Originally Posted by Dominick Ferone

Tech Valley had 195 303 and 5030 at the start and as the competition went on 3624 and 20 had joined as well as a few more i believe.

During eliminations, we had 5254's ramp tethered to our robot. They needed it to increase their scoring output, but they didn't have the weight to have both the ramp and their crossbow to grab containers from the step (which we badly needed).

20 had the weight since we removed our active intake, and we tethered their ramp to our robot. We were concerned about the tether getting caught in our wheels, but we managed to avoid it for most of playoffs by accounting for it in match strategy.

Our third partner, 3624, also used a ramp for their last qualification match, and looked fairly impressive. In their first match with a ramp, they managed to make their first capped stack of 5 of the tournament. They were also excellent at capping stacks of 5 with their other manipulator.

[alo098]

How did your teams get around these rules for the robot?

No Risk of Damage to Other Robots - e.g. spearing, entangling, upending or adhering. <G16, R08>

[EricH]

Originally Posted by alo098

How did your teams get around these rules for the robot?

No Risk of Damage to Other Robots - e.g. spearing, entangling, upending or adhering. <G16, R08>

You use a tether that is difficult to tangle up in. Also, generally speaking, if you do such things to your partners, you've inflicted enough of a penalty on yourself that the refs probably won't call it. (They may send you back to the LRI, though, for reinspection of the hazard.)

I know for 1197, we only tangled once, and it was ourselves we snagged. Figures it'd happen in F2 at L.A....