09-03-2003 18:56

Camerzn

Broken Crates

Do I spy two broken crates? About how much force does it take to break one of those? Do the judges really care?
-CameraMonkey

09-03-2003 20:11

Hailfire

Well, while we were testing our robotic arm that is able to flip bins over, we accidentally told the arm to come down and it broke one of the bins on the corner. We used only a window motor, but still, that's a lot of force.

09-03-2003 20:19

Josh Hambright

crates break...its a part of the game.

A few bots in cleveland got disabled for breaking crates. I saw a few actualy shatter. Its usualy the tops that break but the whole crate isn't that strong.

09-03-2003 20:36

bigqueue

Buy Crate company stock!

Broken crates.....yikes.....I suspect that 50% of them ended up broken in the BAE NH regional.

We caught one between us and a competitor and our stacking arm went right through it.....we had to "shake it off".

i'll tell you, that crate company is the place to buy stock...at least for the next month or so! ;-)

-Quentin

10-03-2003 17:43

Hailfire

Imagine all of the broken bins. Could you imagine how much that would cost to replace? Lots of money right there.

10-03-2003 17:50

sevisehda

I don't think the company is publicly traded because I've never been able to locate a stock symbol.

10-03-2003 18:44

David Lantz

I know from experience that these bins arent' that hard to break. Durring the quarterfinals at St. Louis our driver and myself encountered this when our front right wheel broke through on one of the bins and proceeded to crush it into shreds as we drove around with it attached to our drive train. It took around 30 seconds for us to get it disloged and then we continued to play the match normally. I wasn't worried about this though, I had seen several other teams encounter the same problem.

PS. We kept that bin as a momento

12-03-2003 20:53

Camerzn

I brought the fragility of the crates up in our team meeting, so we decided to test it. And by test it, I mean have several people hit it with stuff. The poor, abused crate's fatigued wall finally gave in when our nutso programmer hit it full force with a 15-20 lb. piece of bronze bar stock. The box flew out of the guy who was holding it's hand and nearly hit our teacher. Needless to say, several people got yelled at, but it was kinda fun, and it gave me the idea for a golf-bot next year.

12-03-2003 21:19

Jrmc

same thing happened in our team meeting, well sorta. While we were testing the optimum height to hit the boxes at i personally punched a few until the sides broke in. Needless to say it was fun, but hard on the knuckles. I am glad to see from watching the webcasts that the bins do fly as well as we expected, it makes it exciting.

12-03-2003 21:28

Cory

at Sacramento off in the corner I would say they had over 150 bins just sitting there. Image this: around 6-12 stacks of bins 6 feet high sitting there. I was shocked I dont think all that many were broken compared to what people thought.

Cory

12-03-2003 22:02

fuubar

i dont remember seeing too many bins break at the sacramento regionals.

i think they gave a way a large number of those extra bins on saturday.

12-03-2003 23:51

Gadget470

*cough*
More than 150 me thinks.

12-03-2003 23:56

Cory

Ok so maybe I just have trouble counting. There were at least that many boxes, if not more at Sac.

Cory