2015 Season Technical Photos

[Everett33]

As a mentor and FIRST alumni, I am always looking for technical photos to learn new ways to design, create and see how other teams went about accomplishing each years new tasks. Please post up photos or links to them from the current and previous seasons.

Here is the link to my Flickr page with photos from Southfield, Kettering, Great Lakes Bay, Livonia, Troy, and MSC here in Michigan. I have photos of both my team and an up close tour of most of the bots in the pits at each event.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/131241717@N05/sets

[Christopher149]

Way cool. I don't have a photo, but I can describe a cool bit of our robot (which didn't seem to get photographed by you).

Our lift rails were 72" of REV 1" extrusion: to get it into the crate, we designed a cut in the rails where we could remove the top 40 inches or so. We took a 36" 10-24 threaded rod, cut it into 10 pieces about 3 inches long each, and turned down the diameter at one end (about 2 inches long) using a file (we learned when the cutting tools snapped the 1st of the 10 pieces). We tapped the five holes in the REV extrusion on the bottom half and inserted the threaded rods. This way, the rods would stay attached to the robot base and the top half could slide on and off of the rods.

To protect the rods, we made two wooden blocks to substitute for the rest of the lift in transport (ie in a van, charter bus, crate, etc). The system held up very well (even though it only has 9 rods since we broke one). It was very nice to have an easily transported robot and to not have to panic when we qualified for St. Louis.

[spydan]

Here's a link to the technical page on our website for our current and past robots: http://www.team708.org/current-robot.html

[Michael Hill]

I gotta say, I like 2959's driver station. Haven't seen such detailed graphics like that.

[Joe G.]

Fantastic work. I absolutely love these types of photos, so much can be learned from them.

Here are some other similar photosets.

I took a huge number of these at champs this year. My camerawork isn't anywhere near as good as yours, but I'll post them here when I finish sorting through them.

[ToddF]

Before we seal our competition bot in the bag, we take photos of the construction details. We do this so the final details on the practice bot, which usually lags behind, match the competition bot as much as possible. Here are the detailed pics of Genome Eta.

Because we continuously improve the robot through competition season, a fair number of these details are different now.

[Everett33]

Thank you for the reply's. If anybody has any close up photos from the pits at champs, I would love to see them.

[nixiebunny]

We just did a photo shoot of our robot and its parts last night for the Behind the Design book. It should be pretty good this year! We used laser-cut plywood. Unusual, yet amazingly effective.

[TheModMaster8]

Well i have a youtube channel for you! this person is amazing. Search " thang010146" in youtube and you'll find that he has a lot of mechanical manipulators there, also i would recommend watching all the "How It's Made" discovery channel series.

[Mike Marandola]

Originally Posted by Everett33

Thank you for the reply's. If anybody has any close up photos from the pits at champs, I would love to see them.

I second this request.

[Joe G.]

Originally Posted by Mike Marandola

I second this request.

I finally found the time to sort through all of my photos. A 2,500+ photo album of this kind of thing will be uploaded in the next day or two.

[Joe G.]

My technical photos from St. Louis are being uploaded here right now. Some are available now, there are 2,537 in total. I'll be working on sorting and tagging them by team better in the future, but due to the unanticipated sheer size of the album, doing this fully is impractical.

The average photo quality on these is nothing special -- I have little/no experience with photography, and most were taken with an old point-and-shoot. About 600 at the end of the album were taken by two of my students, and are of much better quality.

Regardless, we're already pulling an incredible amount of information from these photos, and have made it a team objective to comprehensively cover future events we attend in a similar way, while improving our photography skills. Look for a lot more like this from 5400 in the future.

[beurwonderwall]

Originally Posted by Michael Hill

I gotta say, I like 2959's driver station. Haven't seen such detailed graphics like that.

Thank you! Our programming team is very proud of that layout.