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Unread 07-08-2004, 23:45
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Enough buying talk. Let's hear about ghettofab!

Alright, so while the buying stuff debate rages on, I'm going to create a refuge.

Let's hear about your (either your or your team's) greatest moments at the art of ghettofab. Let's hear about your electrical tape team numbers and cobbled-together parts and transmissions that miraculously worked in competition!

It's time to celebrate the ugly, the how's-that-hold-together, the "I need a tetanus shot looking at it" creations!
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Unread 08-08-2004, 00:05
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Re: Enough buying talk. Let's hear about ghettofab!

at the peachtree regional, we found that our robot was unable to climb the small steps. luckily a coach from 494 helped us build some 'sliders' out of some extra material the martians had (delrin, i believe), using a sawz-all and a hand drill. the sliders (along with a pneumatic cylinder) allowed us to get up onto the 6-inch platform in one bound.

the sliders are the white triangular pieces affixed to the front of the bot.
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Unread 08-08-2004, 00:46
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Re: Enough buying talk. Let's hear about ghettofab!

Half the weight of our robot this last year was in zipties. Colorful zipties.
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Unread 08-08-2004, 00:47
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Re: Enough buying talk. Let's hear about ghettofab!

The Original 229 Ghetto-Fab Moment:
(Sponsored by Tom Schindler)

This all goes back to 2002.
In the 2002 game, in order to pick up the soccer balls, we had this giant roller on the front of our robot. This roller was basically a giant wooden cylinder coated in grippy-foam, with a steel shaft running through it.

We picked up the soccer balls through sheer energy transfer. We spun that baby up to high speed, and as soon as a soccer ball touched it, *bam* it got blasted up through this alum shoot into the goal. It wasn't the most elegant method of the season, but it probably was one of the simplest, and it worked pretty darn well. (Who was at Cleveland that year?)

Anyways... we drove this massive roller with a drill motor. Off the motor we had a 1:4 timing belt reduction (do the math, that's 5000 RPM kids). It wasn't the neatest setup either. First off, with that kind of reduction, it took a few seconds for the roller to get up to full speed, but from there on out, angular-momentum did the rest.

The drill motor was kinda just, crammed into a timing belt pulley, and setscrewed in place. The wooden roller wasn't completely on center on the shaft, and neither was the driving pulley. This meant, the entire assembly oscillated like crazy. Basically, the entire thing was held together with good feelings and luck.

Ghetto enough?
Not yet dear friends... it goes on.

Now, because of the way that drill was mounted, the shaft was basically cantilevered. Yes... crazy stress concentrations.

At Bash @ the beach that year, about midway through the competition, the drill motor shaft just sheared right off. This left the pinion inside the timing belt pulley. With no way to fix it, we were in a tough spot.

Enter Tom Schindler.
Tommy "the man" Schindler was kinda bumming around that day, and hopped onto our pit crew for a while. (This making him, the first ever, honorary 229er. Tommy was the original 229-lover, everyone else is just copying him.)

So Tom was around when this happened. As we were all scambling for a soluition... Tommy just said something like "Dude. Just epoxy it back together."

What? Are you crazy? Hmmm... it could actually work!

So... we crammed that drill back into the pulley, tried to get it as straight as we could, and just slathered on the epoxy. It actually held up for the rest of the competition.

The moral(s) of the story:
-Epoxy fixes everything
-Drill motor output torque isn't enough to shear epoxy
-Tom Schindler is the man.


That's all folks. Anyone else?

JV
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Last edited by JVN : 08-08-2004 at 00:51.
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Unread 08-08-2004, 01:07
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Re: Enough buying talk. Let's hear about ghettofab!

Enter team 1257... Let's see, where do I begin? I think I should make a picture with arrows pointing to different highlights of ghettofab on our robot.


  1. Lift for hook/2x ball. Two hevy-duty 40 inch full extension drawer slides bolted together to make a 3 section lift that provides a height change of just under 80 inches. weight: ~20lb cost: $250
  2. The winch that powers the lift is the FP with included wheel hub inside a short piece of that large aluminum box extrusion in the KOP
  3. wall mounting hook purchased from Home Depot used for hanging. Personally, I think this is by far the best hook I have seen on any robot. It is very light (<8oz, I'd guess), cost about $8 and the only modification done to it was done by hand/hacksaw just to make the hook wide enough to accomodate the hanging bar. Additionally, it actually has two hooks (It's one of those hooks for like hanging a coil of hose. A 'U' with the tips bent in the third dimension to make 2 hooks.) making hooking easier, it supports the weight fine with only one hooked.
  4. Our pride and joy, same winch from number two used for lifting the robot except for one awesome modification. A large, ratcheting socket wrench with a 2" socket attached to it to prevent back drive. This might disqualify it from ghetto fab, but we had a guy cut 5 slots into the socket so that it meshes with the spokes of the FP wheel hub thing. To make up for that, after the spokes became damaged and it looked like they might not hold, I globbed a bit of epoxy all over them to hold that socket in good and reinforce the spokes. We also achieved further reduction in gearing for this winch by double riggin the cable to the hook by simply looping the cable through the hook and fixing the end of it to the side of the winch.
  5. Numerous pieces manufactured from sheet metal using sheet metal snips, a vice, and hammers.
  6. For a while, we had a protective electronics cage made out of PVC and golf club shafts zip tied together. Personally that was far beyond my taste for ghettofab, it wasn't effective at all (Heavy and weak). We eventually replaced it some time during one of the regionals with a cage made with 1/16" thickness angle aluminum and 1/8" bolts and the construction methods mentioned in 5.
  7. After changing the cage, we realized we were just about up for a match and the sign we had previously had on the cage either didn't fit or something like that, so I just wrote 1257 on a few pieces of 8 1/2x11 and zip tied them on.
As for the success of the parts. Most of it worked very well. The main exception being the winches. We had a good bit of problems with cable/rope getting jammed in them. We eventually resolved these problems relatively well. Also, the ratio of the winch used for lifting the robot is a bit high. Rather than triple rigging, I plan on turning down the FP hub a bit. Of course, if I don't get access to a lathe, I will just have to chuck the thing in a drill press and get cracking with some coarse sand paper

In contrast, now that it looks like we are going to secure some machine shops as sponsors, I am designing a summer project of mine (chasis and drive train) and CADding up every part. I will most likely be able to send the entire set of sketches to a machine shop, buy bearings, and hardware, and bolt the freshly cut parts together.
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Team 1257


2005 NYC Regional - 2nd seed, Xerox Creativity Award, Autodesk Visualization Award
2005 Chesapeake Regional - Engineering Inspiration Award
2004 Chesapeake Regional - Rookie Inspiration award
2004 NJ Regional - Team Spirit Award

Last edited by Max Lobovsky : 08-08-2004 at 01:30.
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Unread 08-08-2004, 01:12
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Re: Enough buying talk. Let's hear about ghettofab!

We used an orange piece of styrofoam as a bumper...and secured it on the front of our robot with zipties at the Annapolis Regional...I laughed when I saw it...funny stuff.
--Dori
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Unread 08-08-2004, 01:23
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Re: Enough buying talk. Let's hear about ghettofab!

At the Palmetto Regional, we needed to lose some weight so we traced our numbers (the numbers that you put on your house or mailbox) with a Sharpie, pulled the numbers off and colored then in with a Sharpie. Oh well, it worked.
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Unread 08-08-2004, 13:27
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Re: Enough buying talk. Let's hear about ghettofab!



The year is 1994. NASA and Carnegie Mellon University have spent nearly $2 million to build "Dante II," an eight-legged walking machine designed to enter the crater of the Mt. Spurr volcano in Alaska. We were staging the robot at the University of Alaska-Anchorage, and it was the day before final deployment to the base of the volcano. During the last reconnaissance trip to the mountain, we noticed two items as we flew over the crater: there was a lot of infall into the crater from the upper slopes of the mountain (the active crater was a secondary vent on the side of the mountain) which created a lot of mist and fog inside the crater as the material was melted by the escaping volcano gases, and we thought we saw some reflections from the bottom of the crater, leading to the idea that there might be a pool of water at the bottom of the crater.

The laser and its spinning mirror scanning assembly were housed in the purple cylinders at the top of the robot. The problem is that all the mist and fog would collect on the lenses of the laser scanner being used to map the terrain around the robot (the terrain maps were needed so the robot could figure out where to place it’s feet as it walked down the crater walls), and make them unusable. We needed something to protect the scanner from the falling material and floating mist. And we needed it quickly - we had about four hours before we had to start loading the robot on to the helicopter for the flight out to the volcano. What to do?

Time to run off to the Eagle Hardware store in downtown Anchorage. Grab a 30-gallon plastic trashcan with lid, and run back to the lab as quickly as possible. Throw away the trashcan (which makes for its own unique problems – have you ever tried to throw away a trashcan?), and keep the lid. Cut a round hole in the lid just big enough to fit over the scanner housing, and hot glue it on top of the robot. And that explains the big floppy black rain hat-looking thing at the top of the sensor mast on the robot. It worked great, and kept the laser and scanning mirror clear for the entire time the robot was inside the volcano.

On to the other problem. If there were a pool of water at the bottom of the crater, then it would be important to try to collect some of it for later analysis. The water would have dissolved volcanic gases in it that could lead to a better understanding of what was happening deep inside the volcano. This was very important to the science team. Unfortunately, the robot was never designed to collect water samples and we had no mechanism for collecting one. Just like the rain hat, if we were going to make something it would have to be done quickly.

Enter an empty Evian water bottle, the pull cord from a lamp, a piece of a vacuum cleaner attachment, a round wooden ball from Eagle Hardware, a plumbing fitting, and more hot glue. Voila! A liquid sample canister with a one-way valve that could be dipped into a puddle and would retain any collected water without spillage. Duct-tape it to the front left leg of the robot (look very closely at the picture and you can just see where it is taped in place), and away we go.

Both of these last minute additions worked perfectly. And it proved once again that “Apollo 13 engineering” techniques can work wonders – finding ways to use what you have on hand to solve a problem, by getting creative and discovering uses for items that were never intended (sounds like the early days of FIRST).

Of course, that was of little consolation when the grizzly bear gnawed on the robot the very next day, but that is another story…

-dave
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Unread 08-08-2004, 13:39
Pat Roche Pat Roche is offline
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Re: Enough buying talk. Let's hear about ghettofab!

Quote:
Originally Posted by JVN
The Original 229 Ghetto-Fab Moment:
(Sponsored by Tom Schindler)

The moral(s) of the story:
-Epoxy fixes everything
-Drill motor output torque isn't enough to shear epoxy
-Tom Schindler is the man.

JV

Back before my time on 134, the teams rookie season to be exact, 9 years ago, the robot was being built, and it was nearly complete, except for one small detail, there was no drive train. So as rookies, the team decided to go direct drive with wooden wheels. Well no one really knew how to attach the wheels. Well one student *coincidently a former Clarkson student* said to the advisor, 'hey why dont we just epoxy the wheels on the motors'. Well they did that, and somehow managed to place very high.

Gotta love the epoxy


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Unread 08-08-2004, 14:38
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Re: Enough buying talk. Let's hear about ghettofab!

Our whole robot was ghettofab, but here are some highlights:
  1. Robot couldn't get up the second step, so we did the calculations and realized our arm wouldn't reach it. Everyone was thinking, "if only we could find a little hook-like object..." about a day before ship date we got an old theatre cane (the kind used to pull bad acts off stage) that we used on stagecrew. We drilled a hole in it and put the van door motor's shaft through it, and in turn bolted the van-door motor to the arm of our robot. The end result was a cane that could whip around and grab on to the bar (which it did!)
  2. We didn't have front wheels, just some ghetto plexiglass "skids." In order to get up the steps we put a bunch of rollerblade wheels on the front of the bot. This worked suprisingly well.

Next year we have two new rules:
  1. KISS sucks.
  2. Zipties are evil.
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Unread 08-08-2004, 14:51
sanddrag sanddrag is offline
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Re: Enough buying talk. Let's hear about ghettofab!

At the 2004 Chatsworth Scrimmage our robot was very top-heavy and flipped over every match so we never got to use the hangar. We got to wondering what the robot would be like without the hanger, at least then we could climb the stair and shove other people off. So, we removed the 30-40 lb hangar and duct taped a Stack Attack bin lid to the robot to cover the drivetrain and other now exposed essentials and we played the next match. The robot did not flip at all but it bounced all over the place. So, to remedy that problem we went around asking every team for any spare metal they had and we duct taped it all together and then put it on our robot to bring it up to weight. I don't think we ever drove it that way though.

Towards the end of the LA regional we had a belt break on our hangar. Either we didn't have time to redo it or we couldn't find a turnbuckle so we used a zip tie to hold the ends of the belt together and tension it. Still works great to this day. On our 2003 robot Heather, we used a Zip tie to space a gear away from the chiaphua motor. That didn't last too long though.

On our 2004 robot, we had a lot of trouble turning so we sliced sump pump hose down the middle and zip tied it over two of the tires. It had ridges for forward traction but it would now slide sideways too. It turned like a dream. I think it was the cheapest fastest "omni wheel" ever made. We had a little trouble climbing the step so we switched over to pool hose which ripped and came off every match in the finals and it didn't turn nearly as well either. But at least we could climb the stairs.
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Unread 09-08-2004, 00:24
Ryan Foley Ryan Foley is offline
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Re: Enough buying talk. Let's hear about ghettofab!

So, heres 350's "ghettofab" entry.

That picture is of our 2004 ball collector (the drive train actually looks decent so it's not important) as it was at the BAE regional. Let me walk you through it part by part.

String- see all that neon yellow stuff? thats string and yess it is holding the frame together. Hey, tape cant be used to hold things together so string worked great. It gave the ball collector some flex too.

String 2- yes the white string going across the collectors sides is our "netting"

PVC Grippers- those white PVC things on top used to be the 2X ball grippers from the 2X arm we had until thursday of BAE. They are there so that they stop the ball collector from going inside the corral, they were added 3 matches in. Held on with bolts and string.

Wood- the frame pieces are wood, and the "L" brackets connecting them (where string isnt used) are metal. the metal and wood together looked terrible.

Wood 2: see those thin pieces of wood along the botton? Yep, scrap wood we picked up in the wood shop before heading to cometition friday. Added so that the balls roll better when we want to get them out.

Roller: the gray cylinder going across the front. A PVC pipe glued and bolted to the 2nd to last FP transmission gear (thanks to 121's great way to speed up the FP gearbox) with rubber stuff glued to the outside for grip. There is no axle, its held on to that little piece of scrap plywood (that is screwed onto the frame) using a 1/4 in bolt going through the end cap of the roller.

Winch: see that big hole on the plywood deck behind the ball collector? Well you can barely make it out but thats a seat motor we are using to raise and lower this thing. It's not speed controlled so the thing comes down as a controlled crash. The seat motor axle is spare key for the 5/8ths shaft. Oh yes, its 5 strands of string interlocked that we used as our winch cable. And no, the seat motor isnt strong enough to lift the ball collector back up all the way.

Pipe Insulation- spare stuff I have no idea where we got it but its used to cover the bolts holding the PVS grippers down and where the "winch cable" joins to the collector itself.

Oh yeah, you cant see it here, but our 350 signs were made friday morning out on the loading dock with spray paint.

No, the bot isnt painted at all. We dont have decorations except for all 20 or 30 of our license plate stickers.

Surprisingly the collector held up the whole competition. Although in our last match the front 2 vertical wood pieces snapped, so the entire top side was flapping around and flexible. Thanks to this, the ball collector could expand and actually hold more balls. So who else can say their bot works better broken?

<edit> sorry the picture is so small</edit>
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Last edited by Ryan Foley : 06-08-2012 at 23:46.
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Unread 09-08-2004, 09:57
Ryan M. Ryan M. is offline
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Re: Enough buying talk. Let's hear about ghettofab!

Our transmission kept stretching just enough to cause the gears to go past one another instead of engaging. No picture of it, unfortuantely, but we ended up just wrapping it in a gazillion rubberbands...
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Unread 09-08-2004, 12:43
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Re: Enough buying talk. Let's hear about ghettofab!

OK, this is my team's specialty.

Flashback to 2003:
1) We were trying to figure out how to put the numbers on each side of the robot, so one of our software engineers actually took a popcorn tin, cut out a rectangle, and we put the numbers for mailboxes on it. Turns out, it worked quite well, even though it got torn to shreds. You can even see a snowman peeking through the numbers on the plate.
2) I counted, and at one point we had some 500 zip ties on our robot, holding everything together, including the gearbox and the motors.
3) For our stacking mechanism, which was built at the very last minute, we didn't have enough metal to finish the stacker. So we took some wood and cut it for the top of the stacking frame and the lifter. We then spray-painted the wood silver so that teams wouldn't notice that it was made of wood and thus vulnerable. We managed to fool everyone, even up close, into thinking that the wood was aluminum. That, my friends, is ghettofabulous.
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Unread 09-08-2004, 20:28
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Re: Enough buying talk. Let's hear about ghettofab!

1293 was surprisingly low on ghettofab, due to the fact that we had no duct tape.

I think the biggest ghettofab moment we had was when we couldn't find Mrs. Sutton (our honcho of nearly all things non-robot), who had printed up our team numbers for the robot. We had to have team numbers, so we used the best thing we could think of...electrical tape.

And it was like that the entire Palmetto regional.

Off of the robot, however, we were kings. We needed a ball tee to practice our autonomous mode, but we didn't have any toilet flanges or anything. Our tee wound up being a lid off of a foam coffee cup (the kind with the indentation in the middle), a length of PVC pipe to fit, and the feeder tray off of a printer to work as a base. (I wound up using tin snips to cut out a perfect fit in the ridges.) It worked for a tee--whether it held up when our robot came stampeding through is another story.
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2004-2006: FRC 1293 (D5 Robotics) - Student, Mentor, Coach
2007-2009: FRC 1618 (Capital Robotics) - Mentor, Coach
2009-2013: FRC 2815 (Los Pollos Locos) - Mentor, Coach - Palmetto '09, Peachtree '11, Palmetto '11, Palmetto '12
2010: FRC 1398 (Keenan Robo-Raiders) - Mentor - Palmetto '10
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