pic: 1396 One-Day Robot

[Mark McLeod]

Originally Posted by Rich Wong

btw- anyone know how they got the new bot home without a crate!

The crate makes a good story too!

For the crate they made a trip to Home Depot for the parts, but as the primary mentor was just starting to assemble it (alone in the pits during closing ceremonies) a mentor from another team happened by and offered up a spare crate they were just planning to tear apart (the other team had shipped the robot and the tools separately I assume). Team 1396 was packed within a few minutes.

On Saturday they received some of the electronic parts, like the robot controller, express mailed from their original robot and swapped them out, so they could return the borrowed parts, but still have a functioning robot. They got to keep some of the FIRST spare parts.
The robot went home in one piece. The photo at the start of this thread was of the robot as it was before it went into the crate.

The robot has two pneumatic wings that pop out to help herd the balls. During autonomous they would start shoving the mobil goal to block the opponents ball chute. In addition to herding they would also block robots from hanging. It worked better than their original robot simply because of the extra experience they got from building two robots, not that they didn't have other problems. A zip tie got caught in one transmission on Friday and broke part of the plastic housing. It got replaced, thanks again to at least three other teams who had spare parts and labor to contribute.