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

[Thayer McCollum]

^^
What is that?!?!

I'm an advocate of getting something to work by any means necessary and so I'm usually able to tell what each jury-rigged sketchy piece does, but with that I don't even know... Might I ask what happened that required that... contraption?

[GeeTwo]

Originally Posted by Thayer McCollum

^^
What is that?!?!

I'm an advocate of getting something to work by any means necessary and so I'm usually able to tell what each jury-rigged sketchy piece does, but with that I don't even know... Might I ask what happened that required that... contraption?

That is one of the most unlikely wheels on Einstein: https://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/s...d.php?t=150021

[s1900ahon]

For Recycle Rush, one of our students had the idea of using a deformable structure on our 3310-style canburglar to absorb impact energy and reduce bounce. His implementation? He taped an empty soda can to each carbon fiber rod.

[GavinL]

I came up with a very clever nickname for our robot. D.A.D, Duct-tape and Dreams. You can guess what it looked like.

[Cam_Team 2619]

Not really on our robot, but to aim our high goal shooter at our off-season event, Team 2619 put a piece of electrical tape on the spot on our laptop screen where the goal needed to be lined up with on our camera. "Vision tracking "

[bobbysq]

Originally Posted by Cam_Team 2619

Not really on our robot, but to aim our high goal shooter at our off-season event, Team 2619 put a piece of electrical tape on the spot on our laptop screen where the goal needed to be lined up with on our camera. "Vision tracking "

We put an image overlay on SmartDashboard, and we used a screenshot of the laptop screen with TableViewer to try to get the correct values into our program. This screenshot also included the dashboard. Our driver then proceeded to score several consecutive perfect shots on the practice field.

He was aiming off of the still screenshot of SmartDashboard in MS Paint and didn't even notice until we thought that the camera froze.

[K-Dawg157]

In 2014 my team's robot (157 AZTECHS) made to eliminations for the first time in years. We were doing well, until one of the belts on our drive train snapped during a match.

We ended up using nuts, bolts, duct tape and zip ties to try to keep the belt together long enough to finish the competition...

It didn't work too well.

[JustinCAD]

Well, some people interpret things differently. It all depends on your point of view. I wouldn't say they are considering it as a racist word, more as a word, when taken out of context, could be offensive to others.

CD is more of a formal forums when it comes to FIRST robotics - r/FRC would possibly be more accepting of the word, though I wouldn't suggest using it there in the first place.

[chapman1]

Well , it seems that at least one person may have missed the point of this discussion. Seriously, if you were a student in an economically disadvantaged school struggling to come up with funding to even continue from year to year, how do you think you would feel to read comments that essentially make fun of anything you and your team tried to do with limited resources? Is that the spirit that FIRST is trying to inspire?

I'll say it again: the implication that comes with the perjorative "ghetto" (and no, it is not the dictionary definition being discussed here) has no place in FIRST.

[dmaggio744]

Last year our off season bot had lexan rectangles on hinges so they could slide down the totes but not up. Fortunately, they would flip too far rendering our manipulator useless.

The solution resulted in the majority of our robot's usefulness relying on the preserverance of paperclips and rubber bands. If it works, im not complaining

[scooty199]

I'll say as a person of color, I don't allow any of the students on the team I mentor use the term ghetto. I had the discussion and broke down the uses of the term and why it's an issue. I don't use it myself. I see it as offensive, particularly as I came from some not so great environments. As I work on making FIRST and other robotics programs more accessible to other students in my area that aren't all the same, I have to do my part to break some things down.

Now to the actual question..

It would most likely be either the pulleys and pneumatic grippers we built for last year's robot. Had some roughly machined metal that was ill-shaped, poorly cut, not smooth, and not uniform for the cable we were using, along with haphazardly cut stock metal. Actually during a community event while running with the robot I actually nearly got skewered by the thing as the bridge wasn't reset.

[IronicDeadBird]

Wow I didn't think I'd get hit for saying what I did.
I'm not on chief delphi to explain my methodology on how I've dealt with racism all my life.
1339 has had issues in previous years that were dealt with in different ways. I'll see if I can get photos

[David Lame]

In 2014 (Aerial Assist), we were having problems with the ball falling out of our shooter. Our shooter was a catapult of aluminum bar, bent to have a circular footprint where the ball rested until being shot. The problem was that it wasn't deep enough. As the drivers raced off after picking up the ball, the acceleration would sometimes cause the ball to drop out. We needed some way to keep it in, but whatever we used had to be something we could pull it over as we picked it up off the floor.

Of course we discovered this problem at our first district, and were trying to fix it during "out of bag" time just before the second district. Mentors had come up with a few proposals, but testing showed them inadequate. We had a few failures. The time was running out. Then someone saw the broom. It was a push broom, 28" wide, with tall, soft, bristles. It fit perfectly. The bristles were easy to drag the ball over with our pickup mechanism, but they provided just enough resistance to keep the ball in the cradle before we shot.

The only thing that made it look a little not so...err...that word, was that it fit so well and worked so well you very well might have thought that we did it on purpose.

[BaileyJoseph166]

Last year we quickly realized while we were at NE District Champs that we needed a can burglar... and so starts the tale of the Jank Shank...

It was an awful piece of 1/2 conduit and some hacksawed brackets with a horribly mounted piston on the side of our robot. It worked with mighty hutzpa! We eventually took it off do to complications with the integrity of the device when we went to St. Louis.

But... when we competed at the offseason event River Rage in NH there was once again a need for the Shank! I was able to borrow and not return (with permission) a piece of square conduit from team 138 and I constructed a new Jank Shank. This monstrosity was held together purely by electrical tape, it was awful. It took be a total of 20 minutes, and the entire time I kept telling people to not expect much, it would only work once. If anyone who was there remembers how this new Shank worked... good. It worked once in a semifinal auto to grab the Great RC painted orange like a Great Pumpkin (Charlie Brown!) and everyone thought it broke accidentally because it was all bent up afterward. It was meant to do that!

And that is the most janky thing I have ever seen on a robot I built!

[Paul Richardson]

Let me just say that there's a whole lot of people chiming in here that I don't think have any real insight into this discussion on "ghetto".

Eastside Memorial High School, a 'borderline failing' high school which replaced an actually 'failed' high school, used to host FRC Team 3320, which I helped mentor from 2013 until they disbanded mid-season in 2015. This school serves a very poor population, with 86.9% of students listed as "Economically Disadvantaged" on the school's webpage.

Originally Posted by chapman1

how do you think you would feel to read comments that essentially make fun of anything you and your team tried to do with limited resources?

Those kids wouldn't make that connection at all. Time and effort turns scraps into elegant, functional robots. Just because you have limited resources doesn't mean you make ghetto robots, and it especially doesn't mean that you think others are making fun of you when they say their own stuff is ghetto. It's a bunch of self-deprecating humor and generally fond memories of fun build sessions making funny mechanisms. Have a laugh about it.

Now, implying that those kids think everything they'd ever made must be crap because the team didn't have resources, that I have a problem with.