What is the most ghetto thing you've seen on a robot?

[Dalas]

So we're working on our climber now, and it struck us how incredibly ghetto (jurry-rigged, cheap, unrefined etc.) it is.

Ours has ground-down bolts, nuts used as spacers, angle ground gearboxes, a wrench as a ratchet, rubber bands, bent steel bars, ground down hex shafts a seatbelt, and generally a lot of crap. Here's pictures:

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1Q...ZGJGeGls M053

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1Q...VzZGJGeGlsM053

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1Q...VzZGJGeGlsM053

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1Q...VzZGJGeGlsM053

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1Q...VzZGJGeGlsM053

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1Q...VzZGJGeGlsM053

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1Q...ZGJGeGl sM053

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1Q...VzZGJGeGlsM053


Anyways I don't have the best hopes for our end-game this year (even if its my fault).

What's the most ghetto thing you've seen on your robot?

[RoboChair]

I have personally built far more janky robot parts than those and won events with said janky robot. Driving a janky robot very well is far better than driving a top tier robot poorly.

[Dalas]

Any pictures? Just curious

We got a fair amount of driving practice in before bag and tag, but this is my first time driving mecanum, and we have a pretty bad weight imbalance screwing with our strafing. Still hoping for a fun regional next week though, I'll drive my best!

[bEdhEd]

In 2014, we had a linear ballista-style ball launcher that used really fat latex tubing. We were running into concerns about the wear and tear on the tubing because it only wrapped around two 1/4 bolts, and there was probably upwards of 150+ pounds of tension in the launcher when retracted. So yes, lots of pressure on a little surface.

It was evident that lubricant was necessary, but as the material was latex, we had to opt for water-based lubricant since oil-based lubricants degrade latex. Well, the only water-based lubricants available near the regional were in the form of personal lubricants at the nearby drug stores and supermarkets.

In our pit for the rest of the event, we had a tube of Astroglide covered with red duct taped and labeled "Secret Sauce." We applied a fresh coat to the latex tubing before every match.

Not sure if it's the kind of "ghetto" you're looking for, but it's certainly an unexpected fix to a problem. Worked like a charm, though.

[TheBoulderite]

In 2013, our design was to have the robot drive to the HP station, be fed frisbees, and hold onto the frisbees until the endgame, where we would scale the pyramid and dump the frisbees into the top of the pyramid for points. The collector for the frisbees broke during the Quals of Colorado, and we ended up fixing it with duct tape and a Team Driven t-shirt.

[techhelpbb]

Dear Craftsman tools,

I am very disappointed in my 1/2" Craftsman ratchet. It doesn't perform nearly as I expect when jury-rigged into an FRC component. I'd like to claim on my lifetime warranty.

...

Dear FRC team,

Although we appreciate your talent and unique use case. We can't provide a replacement for a use we clearly did not intend.

[DaveL]

Originally Posted by techhelpbb

Dear Craftsman tools,

I am very disappointed in my 1/2" Craftsman ratchet. It doesn't perform nearly as I expect when jury-rigged into an FRC component. I'd like to claim on my lifetime warranty.

...

Dear FRC team,

Although we appreciate your talent and unique use case. We can't provide a replacement for a use we clearly did not intend.

Too Funny!
Maybe vendors will see the value in having an "FRC Robot Tested Tough" sticker on their products.

Like in the days of yore when Timex had funny ads showing how tough their watch was.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?featur...&v=ynSrvluQBy8

[Moonsault]

Originally Posted by DaveL

Too Funny!
Maybe vendors will see the value in having an "FRC Robot Tested Tough" sticker on their products.

Like in the days of yore when Timex had funny ads showing how tough their watch was.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?featur...&v=ynSrvluQBy8

Our team has used 3/8 wrenches in our super shifter.

[Ryan_Todd]

Accepting the previous conclusions about choice of language, I'm rolling with "janky" to describe things that look like they shouldn't work, but do anyways (and as such, these are among the best moments for fond recollection in years to come).

You wouldn't know it by looking at our more recent robots, but 862 was once defined by our mastery of all things jank. With inconsistent availability of build spaces and a complete lack of precision tooling (our first in-house drill press was a pretty big deal), we promoted ourselves based on our "old school" build philosophy (if it requires any more tooling than a hacksaw and drill, it can't be done).

During my rookie year in '06, our team had an expanding hopper to hold poof balls; the walls of the hopper were made of fabric, which naturally kept getting torn. In between each match, we patched up any new holes with zip ties, until eventually we ended up with no fabric left at all; just a sheet of zip ties linked together like chainmaille.
(I would also call out our collection roller system from the same year, but that wasn't really all that janky; it just sucked.)

The next year in '07, we initially didn't give our claw enough leverage to consistently clamp onto the inner tubes and hold them stable; a couple of gel insoles zip tied to the claw helped to solve that problem with better friction.
(Don't even get me started on the janked-out ramp we concocted for other bots to climb on top of; alumalite sign panels were never meant for use as weight-bearing elements, much less with 2.5" swiss cheese holes drilled through them!)

During the '08 competition season, we discovered that we had vastly underestimated the side loads that our elbow joint would be subjected to; we managed to get by for a while, bending it back into shape in between each match with a pair of vise grips and our trusty dead-blow hammer... But when it snapped clean in two near the end of the competition season, we ended up needing to replace the whole assembly.
Later during the post-season, we wanted to protect our nice expensive mecanum wheels during demonstrations on concrete; for a while there, we ran the bot with strips of carpet zip tied to the wheels as sacrificial treads.
(We also ended up using the same carpet-tread technique a year later in '09, of course, to protect the FRC-mandated slick wheels!)

[RoboChair]

Originally Posted by bEdhEd

In 2014, we had a linear ballista-style ball launcher that used really fat latex tubing. We were running into concerns about the wear and tear on the tubing because it only wrapped around two 1/4 bolts, and there was probably upwards of 150+ pounds of tension in the launcher when retracted. So yes, lots of pressure on a little surface.

It was evident that lubricant was necessary, but as the material was latex, we had to opt for water-based lubricant since oil-based lubricants degrade latex. Well, the only water-based lubricants available near the regional were in the form of personal lubricants at the nearby drug stores and supermarkets.

In our pit for the rest of the event, we had a tube of Astroglide covered with red duct taped and labeled "Secret Sauce." We applied a fresh coat to the latex tubing before every match.

Not sure if it's the kind of "ghetto" you're looking for, but it's certainly an unexpected fix to a problem. Worked like a charm, though.

We applied white lithium grease to the surgical tubing bundle of our 2014 bot. It kept disappearing so we kept adding more, worked fine all season.

Edit: also at our first event we had to C-clamp a major component(without it we couldn't shoot properly) into place after it broke, we then proceeded to run 2 perfect cycles back to back at Inland Empire with a seriously crippled robot.

[chapman1]

I don't know about anyone else, but personally, I find the phrase "most ghetto thing" offensive.

Invite conversation about shoddy construction and poor taste if you want to, but to equate it to anything that comes out of poor urban areas reeks of classism and racism. It has no place here.

[Shrub]

Originally Posted by chapman1

I don't know about anyone else, but personally, I find the phrase "most ghetto thing" offensive.

Invite conversation about shoddy construction and poor taste if you want to, but to equate it to anything that comes out of poor urban areas reeks of classism and racism. It has no place here.

Just gonna bump this. "Ghetto" being used to describe something negatively or of poor craftsmanship has a strong history of classism and racism. There are many, many other words out there that could have been used instead of "ghetto", and part of making FIRST more inclusive and welcoming to PoC and people from low income areas (which is what teams are looking for, or should be looking for), is eliminating language like this and using it in this way.

[Aura_]

Come on dude everyone knows what he means with ghetto do be so critical about it.

[cadandcookies]

I have a friend from a team that describes how sketchy an idea/solution is by removing letters from the word "sketchy." I've been a part of teams that got down to what I would consider "ske."

And yeah, no need to refer to badly-made robots parts as ghetto. There are plenty of other words that less people will find offensive that one can use.

[Madison]

Originally Posted by Aura_

Come on dude everyone knows what he means with ghetto do be so critical about it.

Come on dude, language changes and we learn to be more respectful of experiences that aren't our own as time goes by.