pic: BEASTBOT 2016 Robot

[maxnz]

Originally Posted by Bruceb

are those WEELEZE wheels?
If so, we used 6 of them.
Didn't think anyone else was using them.
Good luck
here is something to think about. Those polyurethane wheels make GREAT static insulators. They allow a LARGE static charge to build up on your bot. We had many comm loss problems that were never completely resolved. It always happened when we were just starting to cross a defense, never when crashing over a defense or smashing into another bot. One time, while on a practice field we heard a loud snap of static discharge as we crossed a defense. We are beginning to believe at least some of our issues were static discharge related.
My suggestion to you is to drag some kind of static discharge material around that is connected to your chassis so it bleeds off that static charge and does not allow it to build up.

We actually have named the robot 'Sparky' because it kept shocking our head build mentor and one of our safety captians multiple times. We haven't had anything serious, it doesn't seem to spark very often, if at all, after the match (I can say that from experience after removing the robot from the field a few times).

We really like our wheels, we are currently ranked 8th. We blame the wheels. We did have a problem with our right wheels for a match, but we fixed that by the next match (it turned out that it was the joystick, it was disabled for some reason).

We also want to thank Dean Kamen for coming to 10K Lakes and making a great speech*.

Can't wait for tomorrow!

(*Sidenote: It also gave us ten extra minutes we needed to fix the robot).