How to lose 6 pounds in 8 hours

[Frenchie]

Take off sensors you don't need. Last year, our two light sensors + cables were worth 0.5lbs.

Francois.

[Fritztopher]

Instead of drilling out the center of your bolts, just remove every other one. You don't really need six bolts there- just use three. Also, if you design your chassis to be a square, you'll end up putting a lot less stuff on your robot, since you won't have the space for it (and less stuff=less weight).

[code_lacky]

It is not hard to loose extreme amounts of weight. As my team would say, take ten pounds off of the programming.

[Pelicano234]

We were over 6 pounds this year and be didn't scrap anything. We drilled holes for 8 hours though...

[Brandon Holley]

The best way to lose weight, is to have it not there in the first place.

Doing everything in CAD helps, but you have to understand that with every part you make, it needs to be strong enough. Anyone can make something very strong to accomplish a task. But making something very strong, and very light to accomplish the same thing...that is what engineering is my friends.

Team 125 this year had a 4 ft. robot in the 120 lb weight class. We weighed in at 98.5 lbs.

[Tt321b]

This year we were 30 pounds over weight and lost it by drilling and cutting out sections that we didn't need all day on Thursday.



Our robot is the wooden one in the middle.

[JesseK]

At least your weight situation was pretty straightforward. During the build season this year we weighed all of the pieces on a scale that is +/- .5 lbs accurate, so we figured we could be off by up to a pound. Weight is also something we carefully consider in advance: The leadership has empowered both students and mentors with an anti cheese hole policy for our team.

We weighed it the systems together, it came up to 106 lbs (5ft robot). We added a bit of bolts and small integration mods, it went up to 112 lbs.

Mind-boggling enough, we then added all of the wiring and went from 112 lbs to 108 lbs. 108 was also what our official weight at our first competition.

There-in lies in incontravertible proof for the analogy that celery is to humans as wires are to a robot!

[gurellia53]

A few days before ship, we swiss cheesed the entire chassis from 9:00PM on saturday to 1:30AM on sunday. Then right before the eliminations in milwaukee we weighed in at 110.0 lbs.

[JesseK]

Originally Posted by gurellia53

A few days before ship, we swiss cheesed the entire chassis from 9:00PM on saturday to 1:30AM on sunday. Then right before the eliminations in milwaukee we weighed in at 110.0 lbs.

Do try to account for weight in your next design. A bad situation of you vs. a pinning defensive bot would have risked the structural integrity of your chassis

[Cooley744]

although your robot looses it's sturdyness (is that a word?), you could change the structure to a lighter wait material. for example, use plastic spur gears...

[Cooley744]

wow i just realized i made a lot of typos there...sorry

[AndyB]

We always go over the bot with a dremel and cut off bolt heads and always make sure that there are no zip-tie ends still attached. If you have ramps, you can put some nice sized holes in the middle area.

[4throck]

At nationals, we came back from uncrating asking if we had any spare pneumatics cylinders. For..... brainstorming reasons.

[Zyik]

Originally Posted by Brandon Holley

Team 125 this year had a 4 ft. robot in the 120 lb weight class. We weighed in at 98.5 lbs.

Did you get pushed around a lot? Why didn't you add some weight so that it wouldn't be as easy to defend against you?



We've had robots that are full of cheese holes. These days we design them so that we don't have to add them. I think we were 119.8 or something pounds at competition.

[cooker52]

Look at these. This was our idea for losing weight. And all it did was help us!
http://hs.facebook.com/photo.php?pid...2&id=733515732