What is the most ghetto thing you've seen on a robot?

[Dalas]

So we're working on our climber now, and it struck us how incredibly ghetto (jurry-rigged, cheap, unrefined etc.) it is.

Ours has ground-down bolts, nuts used as spacers, angle ground gearboxes, a wrench as a ratchet, rubber bands, bent steel bars, ground down hex shafts a seatbelt, and generally a lot of crap. Here's pictures:

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1Q...ZGJGeGls M053

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1Q...VzZGJGeGlsM053

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1Q...VzZGJGeGlsM053

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1Q...VzZGJGeGlsM053

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1Q...VzZGJGeGlsM053

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1Q...VzZGJGeGlsM053

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1Q...ZGJGeGl sM053

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1Q...VzZGJGeGlsM053


Anyways I don't have the best hopes for our end-game this year (even if its my fault).

What's the most ghetto thing you've seen on your robot?

[RoboChair]

I have personally built far more janky robot parts than those and won events with said janky robot. Driving a janky robot very well is far better than driving a top tier robot poorly.

[Dalas]

Any pictures? Just curious

We got a fair amount of driving practice in before bag and tag, but this is my first time driving mecanum, and we have a pretty bad weight imbalance screwing with our strafing. Still hoping for a fun regional next week though, I'll drive my best!

[bEdhEd]

In 2014, we had a linear ballista-style ball launcher that used really fat latex tubing. We were running into concerns about the wear and tear on the tubing because it only wrapped around two 1/4 bolts, and there was probably upwards of 150+ pounds of tension in the launcher when retracted. So yes, lots of pressure on a little surface.

It was evident that lubricant was necessary, but as the material was latex, we had to opt for water-based lubricant since oil-based lubricants degrade latex. Well, the only water-based lubricants available near the regional were in the form of personal lubricants at the nearby drug stores and supermarkets.

In our pit for the rest of the event, we had a tube of Astroglide covered with red duct taped and labeled "Secret Sauce." We applied a fresh coat to the latex tubing before every match.

Not sure if it's the kind of "ghetto" you're looking for, but it's certainly an unexpected fix to a problem. Worked like a charm, though.

[TheBoulderite]

In 2013, our design was to have the robot drive to the HP station, be fed frisbees, and hold onto the frisbees until the endgame, where we would scale the pyramid and dump the frisbees into the top of the pyramid for points. The collector for the frisbees broke during the Quals of Colorado, and we ended up fixing it with duct tape and a Team Driven t-shirt.

[RoboChair]

Originally Posted by bEdhEd

In 2014, we had a linear ballista-style ball launcher that used really fat latex tubing. We were running into concerns about the wear and tear on the tubing because it only wrapped around two 1/4 bolts, and there was probably upwards of 150+ pounds of tension in the launcher when retracted. So yes, lots of pressure on a little surface.

It was evident that lubricant was necessary, but as the material was latex, we had to opt for water-based lubricant since oil-based lubricants degrade latex. Well, the only water-based lubricants available near the regional were in the form of personal lubricants at the nearby drug stores and supermarkets.

In our pit for the rest of the event, we had a tube of Astroglide covered with red duct taped and labeled "Secret Sauce." We applied a fresh coat to the latex tubing before every match.

Not sure if it's the kind of "ghetto" you're looking for, but it's certainly an unexpected fix to a problem. Worked like a charm, though.

We applied white lithium grease to the surgical tubing bundle of our 2014 bot. It kept disappearing so we kept adding more, worked fine all season.

Edit: also at our first event we had to C-clamp a major component(without it we couldn't shoot properly) into place after it broke, we then proceeded to run 2 perfect cycles back to back at Inland Empire with a seriously crippled robot.

[chapman1]

I don't know about anyone else, but personally, I find the phrase "most ghetto thing" offensive.

Invite conversation about shoddy construction and poor taste if you want to, but to equate it to anything that comes out of poor urban areas reeks of classism and racism. It has no place here.

[techhelpbb]

Dear Craftsman tools,

I am very disappointed in my 1/2" Craftsman ratchet. It doesn't perform nearly as I expect when jury-rigged into an FRC component. I'd like to claim on my lifetime warranty.

...

Dear FRC team,

Although we appreciate your talent and unique use case. We can't provide a replacement for a use we clearly did not intend.

[Shrub]

Originally Posted by chapman1

I don't know about anyone else, but personally, I find the phrase "most ghetto thing" offensive.

Invite conversation about shoddy construction and poor taste if you want to, but to equate it to anything that comes out of poor urban areas reeks of classism and racism. It has no place here.

Just gonna bump this. "Ghetto" being used to describe something negatively or of poor craftsmanship has a strong history of classism and racism. There are many, many other words out there that could have been used instead of "ghetto", and part of making FIRST more inclusive and welcoming to PoC and people from low income areas (which is what teams are looking for, or should be looking for), is eliminating language like this and using it in this way.

[Aura_]

Come on dude everyone knows what he means with ghetto do be so critical about it.

[cadandcookies]

I have a friend from a team that describes how sketchy an idea/solution is by removing letters from the word "sketchy." I've been a part of teams that got down to what I would consider "ske."

And yeah, no need to refer to badly-made robots parts as ghetto. There are plenty of other words that less people will find offensive that one can use.

[Madison]

Originally Posted by Aura_

Come on dude everyone knows what he means with ghetto do be so critical about it.

Come on dude, language changes and we learn to be more respectful of experiences that aren't our own as time goes by.

[ratdude747]

The most (insert non-racist word here) hack I've seen was 1646 in 2008 at Great Lakes regional. They built a ball herding lap runner and a fast one at that... and during eliminations their mechanism broke to the point of requiring removal, and that caused all sorts of weight distribution issues. OK, what to do? Add weight, obviously... but what to add? Obviously they couldn't add extra CIMs or batteries (the latter was more obvious then than in 2014), so they had to go for the next heaviest thing in the pits, tools! Wrenches, a drill press vice, you name it, they added it to the front of the robot to get the weight back. They didn't advance to finals, but it was still funny to look at.

[Pretzel]

I still have the crescent end of a combo ratchet/crescent wrench that we used to make a gearbox addition in order to prevent backdriving of a motor at all times. The funny part was that at first we installed the wrench the wrong way, meaning that it had to be taken completely apart (a not so kind procedure) before being reinstalled.

There was a part last year on our robot, which held the end of a Dart actuator in place, that was meant to be CNC milled. It was a small part that was to be made from box tubing with precision, not thinking about the small surface area of the part, I attempted to run it on a CNC mill with a tape plate (3 of the 4 sides had to be cut, hence the tape plate). One loudly thrown part later, I decided that manual machining would be precise enough since we did not have enough time to machine a fixture for the part at that point in the build season. Thus was born the "TNC" (Tyler Non-numerically Controlled) bracket, a part which could only be described as "passable" after using a belt sander to attempt to shape the part from a rectangular piece of box tubing down to the teardrop shape specified in the CAD model. It was eventually replaced after two regional events worth of abuse caused it to begin to buckle (I later postulated that techniques used such as "using a vice to mash it back to square" and "beating on it with a hammer" did not result in it having the highest measure of structural integrity), but while it was on the robot it fairly evident that it did not belong despite the fact that it worked.

[HurdFIRST]

I just had to address a student about this exact issue in the pits at Kettering last week. She was addressing a cable ran to the second floor via a ladder with caution tape wrapped around it. My exact words to her were "unless there's 7 hungry families living in that ladder, you need to find a different word to describe it."

It's not about being politically correct, it's about being inclusive and approachable. (I hope) you wouldn't call someone acting in an undesirable manner gay for the same reason that you shouldn't call the crap you put on your robot ghetto. In doing so you let those who are gay and those who actually live in the ghetto know that they are undesirable and that they are crap respectively.