When Did You Finish Your Robot

[jimbot]

HA, who needs a finished robot when you can have all the fun of building one at regionals... anybody? 1 hour befor ship our launcher team shows up and says, "It doesn't work, throw the phnematics in and we will build it there." Doesn't that sound like fun...

[dtengineering]

Well, we THOUGHT we had finished our 2005 robot after the 2005 GTR. But it turned out it was a great practice drivebase for testing this year's drive code, so off came the arm, and on went a gyro and new code.

We THOUGHT we had finished our 2006 robot after the 2006 GTR. But it turned out that we needed a couple CIMs from it for this year's machine. So off came the gearboxes and CIMs then back on they went, minus two of the CIMs that we use to race around the track this year.

We THOUGHT we had finished our 2007 robot after the 2007 GTR, but it turned out that a nearby team wanted to borrow some pneumatics from it and we needed to re-use some of the sonar sensors, so off they came.

We THOUGHT we had finished building our 2008 robot when we put it in the shipping crate... but snapped the "hockey sticks" in about five minutes at Portland, and are now re-designing our gripper mechanism to work even better, and will be changing a few sensors as well when we get to Seattle.

I would, however, say that we have finally, truly, finished with our 2004 robot. After pulling the electronics several years ago, the motors last year, and the scissors lift (to use as a test to see if we wanted to scissors the ball over the overpass) this year... there just isn't that much left. So that would suggest that we typically finish a robot about five years after we start it.

Jason