Enough buying talk. Let's hear about ghettofab!

[gburlison]

2002 was our second year and we thought we learned so much from our rookie season. Our robot was almost entirely 1.25 square aluminum tubing. It weighed so much that we had to save weight any way we could. Instead of organizing the electronics neatly on some type of board, we just zip-tied everything somewhere on the frame. Wires and tubing went everywhere. When something went wrong it took forever to trace the wires and fix it. We placed last at the inaugural St Louis regional, but since we had a spot at EPCOT, we spent the elimination rounds designing some changes and hacksawed off the front half of the robot. The plan was to replace it with 1.25' PVC pipe that we brought to EPCOT. We spent the first day at EPCOT attaching the PVC with self tapping sheet metal screws. In the end our robot was half square aluminum tubing and half PVC. Our team numbers were printed on white label paper, except someone had the bright idea to print only one number per sheet.