pic: Controllers

[VGMasterShadow]

Ooooh, shiny glowy thingy with lots of buttons.

Very nice controller, and very amusing, but mostly amusing.

[Billfred]

I'll throw out one question...what's up with the seat belt buckle on the side in the bottom picture? And the small box on the right in that one?

[Alexander McGee]

Ahh yes.

The seatbelt buckeles are for a strap with the male ends of a seatbelt. You could "buckle up" and throw it over your shoulder like a gym bag. At 15 lbs, it was a nice feature.

The box at the end is actually a battery pack for a Bosch drill motor (like the old drills from 2002). This powers the LED's and neons, as well as providing a source of power for the RC controller. This way, we could sit in the back of a trailer at a parade, and drive the robot alongslide without a tether or AC current to the controller.

It took me 6 horus to build the first one. Then, i re-read the rules and realized it was 6 inches too long. For fun, i took it to the band saw and cut off 6 inches. It looked kinda funny. Anyways, it took only 2 hours to do the second one, because i had all the dimensions drawn out now, and knew how everything would fit.

It's all made of aluminum, and is fairly inexpensive to make. The lights costed 20 bucks total, the aluminum worked out to around 35 dollars, and the seatbelts were free from a scrap bin.

I plan on helping my students come up with something awsome this year. Stay tuned.