Before the robot is taken apart...

[ManicMechanic]

Although our regional events are only beginning, I know that many teams are done for the year. Before disassembly, would you considering taking photos of mechanisms that you're willing to share and posting them at the end of the season? Not all photos are equally useful -- I'm especially interested in photos that have close-ups of mechanisms with straight-shot, unobstructed views. Even better are a series of a few photos showing the assembly process -- you don't have to show every screw and/or complicated CAD designs (try taking photos as you take apart and reversing the sequence). My intention is to collect these into a beginning builder's guide to share so that VEX newbies can build a few cool projects and learn some basic mechanics in the process.

Any ideas are welcome, but I'm especially interested in some things we've unsuccessfully tried to reverse engineer:

1. A spring-loaded launcher - Vexlabs's ping-pong launcher looks like it uses a rubber band, but we can't figure out how to make the hinge that activates the spring. The view is blocked by plates.

2. A conveyer belt mechanism - The video from Team 40 is shows this, but we've not been able to get sufficient friction using tank treads and plates.

3. Holonomic drive - We can visualize a static model of this, but don't understand dynamically how it moves and how to drive it.

We have a couple things that might even be worthy of sharing, but we'll to see if they're actually competition-worthy in the next 2 months.