things to keep in mind while in the pits..

[Kevin Sevcik]

For that matter... As long as we're mentioning stuff in the pits, always remember your safety gear as long as you're in your pit. Or doing anything with a power tool. Also, if your robot has a huge arm that moves around above head height, you should probably seriously consider a few bump caps/hard hats in addition to the standard safety glasses, gloves, etc.

Other thoughts:

Roll pins suck. Atleast they do for power transmission. Either the pin is too small and will shear, or the pin will be too big for your shaft, and your shaft will be weakened enough that it will yield. This happened when I let a machinist change the first run design of our tranny last year. After I spent several days machining properly keyed shafts as originally designed, things worked much better.

Also, for securing our battery last year, we used a 2 inch wide velcro strap. It was a long strip of female velcro with a short strip of male on one end and a plastic loop on the other. you wrap it around the battery and some piece of structure in your battery holder area, thread the male end through the loop and tighten it down and stick it to itself. Very strong, very quick and easy to remove.

Try to standardize on one or two bolt sizes and then buy a lot of wrenches and sockets for those sizes. Cause otherwise you'll never be able to find the right wrench/socket/nut/tap/washer when you need it.

Secure your electrical wiring to keep it out of the way of moving parts. One year we had an arm that folded against our chassis near the battery. Predictably, in one round, the battery cable was hooked by the arm as it was unfolding, and our robot rapidly stopped working.

If you have time, make spares of critical parts or parts that are exposed to "vigorous interaction" with other robots. Unless you have made these parts very strong, there's a good chance something will happen and you'll be left scrambling to repair them. Corollary: make these parts difficult to break. Our robot last year had a long arm to grab the chin-up bar. We chose PVC as a material because, while heavier than similarly strong aluminum pipe, it is extremely elastic and bends a lot before breaking. We were wrapped around the pole several times and came out fine.