When did you finish your robot? (if at all :)

[David V]

A couple of our builders who intern at our mentor (Georgia Tech) finished it about an hour before ship time. It was so down to the line that I made a bet that it hadn't been finished and lost $10 -_-.

[Ellery]

Seems like alot of common issues everyyear. We've had our robot mechanically done in the first 1.5 weeks but then somehow the electrical/software always gets delayed somehow and I don't even know why... More continuous improvement. I'm relearning everything at this point just to try to understand why things are not delivered as expected. Maybe that's why I'm a systems engineer - I do alittle of everything.
Ellery

[Pin Man]

We finished our robot a week before the dead line... Oh yeah we also had like 30 inches of snow to force us to miss a week of build... So we did ours in 4 weeks technically... There is just a few programming things to be done with the camera but it runs alright... I mean we managed to win the Conneticutt Scrimmage with two other great teams... :0P but normally our team finishes like the day of if at all... haha... finally a year where we finish... or come really close to it...

[MasonMM]

guess our team is the oddball out. We set a massive goal to build a three week robot and mostly accomplished it. It gave a great amount of time for tweaking, autonomy programming, and practicing all before ship.

[Tom Bottiglieri]

Whats your definition of finished?

Sure, our robot's mechanical features are done, but there still needs to be alot of code modifications. In my book, we are still not done.

[Ryan F.]

Theres always something more to do on the robot....but I'd say we got ours done saturday before ship. Minor details were ironed out later.

[Mike33]

we mostly have code left to write but the mechanical parts were done at least a week before(but im not real sure because time seems to slow down and speed up without warning). The chasis and end-effector were connected a couple of days before but still had minor things to be tweaked. So in the end, its only as finished as to what your definition of finished is.

[Kris Mackinnon]

Three days before. But it was really the deadline day for us since we couldn't get into the place that we build so we had to be done that Saturday.

[Liz C]

Originally Posted by tiffany34990

it's never finished...always tweaking to be done....

exactly, but we were tweaking up until the last minute..so i guesss that qualifies as day of deadline...

[cdawzrd]

Heh... we will be frantically working on Thursday to finish the bot... Our tetra-holder isn't done yet and our arm needs work, not to mention all the programming work...

[roboguy #1]

Well it drives it lifts tetras the robots done, unless we add braces to help keep our gear happy. Mainly the gears. All tht needs to be done is have our 2 lazy programers do a "kiss" type of code.

"Keep It Simple Stupid"

[Lazarus (Adam)]

We finished HOURS BEFORE the shipping.

Talk about last minute...

[Validius]

We stacked out first tatra the monday before teh deadline but then we had to take stuff apart cuz parts of the mechanisim would not hold up. (bigger steel bars to hold the pullies)

We still arnt done... we gotta switch out some wheels. As driver i REFUSE to have a caster bot.

[davelu]

$@#$@#$@#$@#$@#$@#! we did not finsh buliding our robot on time! this is 4th year! we had the drivetrin working and running as well as the arm but the senors weren't placed in postion... ahh..now weve got whole bunch other things to worry about.

[Leav]

thanks for the feedback:

1)kudos to all teams who build a robot fast and only had to tweek!
2)good luck to teams who still have work to do!
3)my definition of finished is having a robot that works. tweaking is a natural thing, i would expect that even the best "hey we were done 12 hours after kickoff!" team would spend every second of the build season to tweak, so if your just tweaking, that counts as finished in my book .