The coolest thing in the world!

[OneAngryDaisy]

I know that feeling-

It was our first match at Philly- we had homecourt advantage and all, and we really wanted to do well..

anyway, we hit the stack first, went over, and then somehow flipped over. This never happened at Chesapeake so we were all bummed.. Our arm driver decided we had nothing to lose, and tried to flip us over.. Amazingly, the chippy pulled through, and we came back to life.

We ended up winning this match with 213 QP's

[codeoftherobot]

I saw at one regional the robot freak out, spin around for about a minute on the top of the ramp then start to smoke as though it was about to blow up. Our team happened to have treads and when we hit other teams at high speeds, we ran right over them and left tread tracks all over their robot. One team we faced in Sacramento came to Silicon Valley and it still had the same scuff marks.

[D. Gregory]

In the practice rounds, our robot was so tippy that when our autonomous took us straight into the wall, we tipped. When we went straight over the ramp and hit boxes, we topped. Of course, we rebuilt our robot and finished 10th without a single tip in qualifying matches.

[codeoftherobot]

What did your team do to fix it. Add stabilizers or just cut the height in half?

[Parks]

since people have mentioned all the damage, I felt like commenting. Some people dislike this game because it is too intense. The way I look at it, it forces the teams to create a robot that can not only do a task and do it well, but also stand up to the abuse of use. This, I believe, has a really good real world application to it. It forces teams to consider the entire design process, and not just finish when the robot is built. I feel that this game, more than others, brings forth the true meaning and practices of engineering.

This is also why I had such an awesome time at the regional. I can't wait until Houston.

[Winged Globe]

Originally posted by codeoftherobot
I saw at one regional the robot freak out, spin around for about a minute on the top of the ramp then start to smoke as though it was about to blow up.

I have a very strong feeling this was us at Sacramento ... We are not going to be drilling near those speed controllers again!

[D. Gregory]

In order to fix our robot, we removed all our devices and were left with a speed, manoeuverable, strong, extrusion box on wheels. We eneded up at 87 lbs so we added 10lbs of steel tube to the bottom of our bot to lower the CoG even more.

[KenWittlief]

at the Canadian regional there were 8 seeding round matches per team - that means you spend:

16 minutes on the playfield in action and

36 hours in the pits (if you stay as late as possible)

all the magic on our team happened in the pits. After the buckeye regional we discovered (by watching the videos) that our flying squirrel was only takeing out two columns of boxes, and it was folding way back.

So we came up with a hindged version on paper, brought all the raw materials with us, and made it 5.5 feet wide in the pits on thursday.

we also moved our battery from standing up vertical on top of the frame, to lying horizontal below the frame. That took two days to implement - we didnt get it attached till saturday morning (after a collision had knocked a hole large enough in our plexiglass panel to run the battery wire through :c)

we also had to repair damaged transmissions between matches 5 or 6 times. We are going to open a transmission repair shop "your tranny fixed in 30 minutes or less, or your next ones FREE!"

Team members who sit in the stands all day miss out on the real action - and the pits REALLY come alive after 6PM on thursday night :c)

[c01100011]

When our grabber arms broke at Suffolk last year and they were flying around. I think the limit switch wiring was the only thing that held them on. We dragged them up the ramp, lucky they didn't turn us off for protruding through it. As I remember we mad it up on the ramp fine put down our suction cups and got the points.