It’s preseason mode, off season events are done, planning on 2019 has started.
Last years bot, are you eyeing it as parts for 2019? Or does it live on for a few years as a demo bot? Or forever since you have so much space?
If you build two or more bots what happens? Keep Prime, clones get harvested? Keep them all because you can? Or do all of them end up being reincarnated as a new robot?
If you salvage, how much do you keep? Just the big ticket item or is the freshman task sorting all those nuts, bolts and washers back into the proper bins? Is it a full teardown, or are there a slew of carcasses around the shop? Do you keep some things as examples (good or bad?)
I was going to try a poll, but the choices got too complex
1293’s historical policy is that parts get stripped off late in the off-season or early in build season. (I don’t particularly like this policy, but it is what’s happened.)
I’m hoping we can keep XaVier running a little longer on demo duty, as we did get 4901’s old control system this off-season and are less constrained on that now. But I’m sure, in time, we’ll rob things like gearboxes and motor controllers.
We build 2 robots. The practice bot usually gets torn down to the chassis in the summer, but the main bot is kept around longer. This year we built a new robot using the chassis from the practice bot, and we will be dismantling our main robot (down to the chassis) soon.
Dismantling the robots down to the chassis allows us to have ample swerve drive bases for the programmers while being able to take most of the parts to be used in the future and saves some space, especially when the robots are large.
Our demo bot is from 2014, which we switched the control system on to be a hero board, so we don’t need to take a driverstation. The game piece is also nice because we can shoot it to people (with waaaay less power than in the season). This robot is also considerably simpler and easier to maintain than our more recent robots.
These aren’t hard and fast rules, if there is an interesting assembly we may keep it (2015 arm). We don’t have that much room for keeping old robots so if it isn’t serving some use it usually isn’t kept (Both 2016 robots are completely dismantled)
The next couple of Saturdays we will be removing the elevator and intake off of our competition robot and leave it so we can still drive at least drive it around. Our second robot from last year, which never had an elevator on it, is already down to just a frame with wheels. We do salvage everything that we could possibly use on either next year’s competition robot or the second robot.
Ideally we will end up deciding on a similar drive base for next year’s game and can get the programming team started immediately on autonomous routines while the competition robot is being built.
74’s general practice was to keep our bots looking nice, as we have room to display them (all bots except 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2013 are displayed in our shop). However, minor electrical and mechanical components were sometimes stripped if they were of use to us on other bots (except our 2014 bot, that one is sacred).
In recent years, 3946 keeps at least one robot going for demos. Most commonly the competition robot from the most recent game, but not always. Usually have two or three things working in summer or fall for builder, wiring, and programming practice. The limiting factor is always the control system; due mostly to a lack of effort in learning to work without the command-based infrastructure, nothing has ever properly transitioned from the official control system to an Arduino or similar.
1072 has kept one 2015 robot, one 2017 robot, and two 2018 robots (one of which we’re probably going to disassemble soon). We also have one offseason chassis we use for testing. I’m hoping to disassemble the 2015 and 2017 robots eventually as we run out of space though- the storage closet is getting a little small.
Never been on a team with two robots where the second robot wasn’t promptly scrapped. Often it’s scrapped right away as spare parts for the comp robot through the offseason.
Particularly good competition robots, or robots useful for demos, tend to be kept operational for a couple of years. Otherwise they are slowly raided for electronics, spare parts, or prototyping.
every year is different. We used to hang on to the old ones, but ran out of room a few years ago (we lost our extra classroom), so now we can only keep 2 or 3. The third one lately has been just a chassis with electronics, that the programmers play with. And the second one loses it’s game playing stuff pretty quickly after the season is over, and gets adapted to outreach configurations…which change, keeping students busy.
We’ve been able to recycle last year’s comp bot chassis to this years practice bots for a few years now. That’s a big help, as far as time/space/money.
We scrap all of our bots due to space concerns. Our 2016 bot was small enough to keep around, though, and I regret not fighting to have it kept around as a demo bot.
For us last year’s robot or the year before, is a place to store robot parts until we need them for our current bot. We usually keep something around for demo though. We just don’t have the resources to keep a bunch of past years robots in running condition. It would be cool to see that evolution though…
We build 2 bots, a Competition Bot & Practice Bot. The Practice bot is completely disassembled and stripped of all its parts. But the Competition Bot, depending on if the bot was successful or if it has a good outreach appeal or certain parts have been removed from being significant to FRC, we may or may not keep it.
For the past few years that we’ve build second robots, the twin has been taken apart and the competition robot lives on to some degree - whether it’s fully in tact or stripped of controls components depends on a) if the robot was good/has good demo capability, and b) if we want to save a few bucks and re-use the control system components the next year. Roborios are $$$$! We’ll occasionally keep a spare/twin drive base if it was a good drive base and can be used for prototyping or programming. We are running out of space so I have the feeling that a few robots are nearing the end of their assembled lifetime (but they’ll live on in our hearts).
Y’know…I see a lot of people knocking this task as being really boring and menial work, but it’s a really good exercise for teaching students the ins and outs of hardware!
I wasn’t knocking it, lots of places use it as a example to all the different kinds of fittings AND since they sort and put them away they don’t need to go “Mr Foster where are the 2” 8-32 cap head screws?"
Although, recycling rivets, that’s hard core… :rolleyes:
We strip down nearly everything off our Comp and practice robots that can be reused, practice more than comp though. Hex bearings, motors, gearboxes, etc. The comp bot you can still see the general frame typically, it’s just missing like wheels, entire electrical systems, and anything else it needs to move. We are planning to keep our practice robot a little longer this year, but stripped down to the drivetrain. We really liked how we made our frame this year so we plan to keep that one for awhile during season until we have an actual robot built. We even started going to the extent this year of reusing the aluminum we weld, we are cutting up our practice elevator to turn into another drivetrain for a build challenge.
