pic: Just finished our pyramid. Conduit seems to work fine.

[alex334]

loading photo ...

[Saberbot]

SO MANY G02 VIOLATIONS!

[CalTran]

What's she weigh in at?

[1683cadder]

You guys own a cnc plasma cutter? lucky. How does my team get one? Very nice pyramid

[Tytus Gerrish]

that looks way better than U-bolts and plywood

[alex334]

Originally Posted by 1683cadder

You guys own a cnc plasma cutter? lucky. How does my team get one? Very nice pyramid

Haha, yea. It's incredibly useful. I managed to pump out the full set of gussets in less than 15 minutes.
We have the 4'x4' table made by these guys: http://www.plasmacam.com/indexfla.php

I'm not quite sure of the overall weight. It's really not that easy to weight this thing.

Thanks for the compliments guys. We just want to give some inspiration to teams out there. CONDUIT WORKS GREAT! =)
Albeit, we had to use extra ventilation and masks to weld this thing. It was well worth it.
The hardest part was probably assembling, we needed about ten people and a dozen 2x4's cut to length to get this thing in position.

And I'm sure that the judges would overlook the G02 violations in this case.

[RRLedford]

Did you use thick walled conduit.

Is the OD spec of this material not ~1/8" larger than the 1.5" of the game pyramid tube spec?

We were also thinking to use the conduit and ignore the size difference.

-Dick Ledford

[rsegrest]

Which set of specs did you use? Noting the differences between the different drawings we are a little concerned about building ours until the GDC clarifies which one is correct...

[pfreivald]

Originally Posted by rsegrest

Which set of specs did you use? Noting the differences between the different drawings we are a little concerned about building ours until the GDC clarifies which one is correct...

I've learned the hard way that all FIRST specs are nominal. Failure to plan around that fact has bit us on more than one occasion!

[rsegrest]

Not really the answer I wanted but at least it's honest guess we'll just pick the one closest to the dimensions given by the game manual...

[pfreivald]

Originally Posted by rsegrest

Not really the answer I wanted but at least it's honest guess we'll just pick the one closest to the dimensions given by the game manual...

Well, let's be honest... Did they give us a spec on how thick the powder coat is? (I do not believe they did!)

Building for less-than-perfect fields is essential for success!

[Andrew Schuetze]

Kudos to you and thanks for posting this variant.

Can you confirm my back of the envelope calculations that the distance from center to center of the horizontal members in the plane parallel to the floor is approximately 22 inches?

[buchanan]

Good job, I was wondering if this might work. The competition pyramid has to be built to a pretty high standard, given that it has to stand up to up to three robots for many matches, but something lighter should certainly be fine for testing.

Originally Posted by RRLedford

Did you use thick walled conduit.

Echo that, inquiring minds really want to know - the $$ difference is about 3x.

[alex334]

Originally Posted by buchanan

Good job, I was wondering if this might work. The competition pyramid has to be built to a pretty high standard, given that it has to stand up to up to three robots for many matches, but something lighter should certainly be fine for testing.



Echo that, inquiring minds really want to know - the $$ difference is about 3x.

The conduit we used had about a 1/16" wall thickness. Make of that what you will.
We built off the specs from the "Game Specific Drawings," not the team version.
We don't really mind discrepancies in pipe diameter and angles (a couple of corners are a few degrees off). If you can't build a robot to tolerate those minor differences in designs and implementations, you are really building it too precisely. As in Logomotion, many teams had very fast minibots, but the tolerances needed to get them onto the pole were just too small. We're thinking the same logic applies to this.
For those of you asking about measurements, the center of the piping in each rung is 30" vertically off the ground. The slant height is about 32"-33" if I remember correctly. Just use some simple trigonometry to figure it out precisely.

[buchanan]

Originally Posted by alex334

The conduit we used had about a 1/16" wall thickness.

This is thinwall, aka EMT. It's the less expensive stuff. It runs around a dollar a foot at my local big box home center.