are you joking?? it was like 3 weeks ago.
Takes a little longer for Hoosiers, don’tch know? 
10 days ago actually. Isn’t it funny how so much has happened since then though?
Thats a pretty small LEGO bin… i remember doing my autonomous robotics course (aka Lego Lab) and sometimes spending upwards of half an hour searching for a part!
We are sooooooo behind we lost two days to snow days (if school gets cancelled so do we) and now we lose a week to midterms (cant meet then either, school rule), and because of the snow yesterday we lose MLK day (one of our only full work days) because midterms extend to tuesday and we can’t meet before the day a midterm either.
so yea…
were behind but not dead yet…we at least have the start to a drivetrain and a prototype arm.
Done already? You obviously haven’t over-engineered enough 
We’re pretty much where we are every year except now I am swamped by Junior Year and it will be a challenge doing as much as i have done in past years. 
We’ve got one old bot…mostly up and running. It drives. So our drivers are totally practicing with that. Our software group’s working on cleaning up some code on another robot so we have two to drive around (they have similar drive trains to what we’re planning on this year). We’ve got parts ordered, we’re furthering our research on what we plan to use for our “arm”, and that’s just about where we are.
Anyone who thinks there done should read my sig.
Team 1529 (Cyber Cards RULE) is finishing prototyping and CADing. We’ve basically got 65% of our CADs done. Then we’ll send them to the fabricator. I don’t know much mroe than that, I’m a rookie after all, and my groupleader likes to work on the manipulator by himself, so I don’t know a whole lot.
Well, if your 'bot was never done, you’d never go to contests, right?
What they mean by that is that, no matter what, you will be changing things, realizing something doesn’t work and scrambling trying to figure out how to make it work. As Bobby said, a key part of the engineering process is to design and optimize. When you test, you’ll more than likely see that you need to change some parts in some way. So technically, you’re never really done.
Also congrats to those who have finished their robot so early.
Wrong-o. Competition is not the end of a 'bot’s life (usually). We’re using our '07 bot as a presentation 'bot (and when we finish '08 we’ll use both of them, '07 is a ramp bot so we can demonstrate some of the stuff that FIRST has us do).
:] ok so we just finished putting together the final touches on our robot. Like i mentioned before we’re done. we took it apart today to make final measurements and final adjustments. The reason we were able to finish our robot so quickly was because we’ve been working on rolling chasis for almost a year now getting the right design together to optomize the torque output for the 6 wheel drive. We built a test track within 2 days of the kick off and made numerous efforts to make sure our robot would be able to go around this w/ ease. we then tested it in a full field of robots and even so we’re able to make about 80 points with a tolerence of about (±)10 points and we’re planning on racking in about 15-20 points in the hybrid mode.
Our design is so simple yet it works so effeciently and so well that there’s no doubt in my mind that it’ll work to its full potential, but ill save that for the comp in april.
anyway to all those teams who said we wern’t done well i mean no offense but when we say we’re done we’re done. we’ve got everything from fundraising to giveaways, to students very well informed of the rules and everything else.
finally ill have a picture of the robot posted within the week…most likly thursday. anyway good look to all the teams…give us some feed back, tell us how ur doing!!!
Wow! Sounds like you guys have the perfect robot after only a week and a couple days! Pretty amazing.
… in fact sounds like you have perfect everyything! Did you guys have help? This is a pretty good feat for a rookie team, because as a ninth year team we’ve never had a robot even close to done til week 4.5.
Care to elaborate on your manipulator, if you have one? Or do you plan to just drive around? I suppose it’s feasible to just have a driving robot by now, but you guys don’t plan on going beyond? Come on! You guys have 4.5 weeks left. Enough time to build a whole other robot! And you made sure that you rebuilt everything once the six weeks started right? Because you aren’t supposed to build things before hand . . .
ummm just a question… you said you worked on this design for a year, did you pre build it?? cause it is against the rules to do that, and it seems really hard for me to believe that your bot was finished in a week and a half we what sounds like a trackball manipulator designed and built.
If you managed to do that, then congrats! If not I hope you have plans to rebuild it now lol!
70-90 points in a full field of robots? Without hybrid? I’m sorry my friend, but I’m going to have to disbelieve you. I also have to mention that using any parts machined, bought, or created before kickoff is illegal.
But eighty points? I can’t see it. Assuming you can place the ball in the end, you’ll need 68 more points. That’s seven laps when hurdling, seventeen with herding, and 34 when just driving. If you hurdle, we’re still talking about making at least seven laps (+ last one to plae the ball). To me, that means that in just over seventeen seconds, you guys can pick up a huge ball that will be bouncing around, nagotiate around five other robots and three other balls, and toss or lift the ball over the overpass. I’m sorry, but I just don’t see that happening.
Surprise me. I’d love to see a team put up 80 points in the teleoperated mode. But I just don’t see it happening. The most I’d believe a team can put up is 60 points (without Hybrid), and that’s with six hurdled laps and placing the ball in the end.
Good luck.
hmmm…80 points would be 10 laps in 2 minutes with a hurdle on every lap. So, that means 1 lap every 12 seconds. The distance around the track at its shortest dimension is about 70 feet (30 or so for each long side, and 5 or so for each sort side). That means a speed of about 6 feet per second with instant acceleration, perfect turns, and perfect action of the manipulator. Possible, but not likely in just 10 days (even for a team of pros).
Also, it sounds from your post that this light-speed development stems from a one year project. That sounds like minor tweaks to mechanisms or designs that existed before kickoff…hmmmm
-JEE
I agree. But two robots working together? Well… that’s another story… Imagine two robots just sitting on either side of the finish line. One robot hurdles, the other robot catches the ball and rolls it back over the finish line (without any part of the robot passing through the finish line of course). The hurdler picks up the ball again and repeats the process… BIG points.
That has, of course, been thought about by the GDC and has, of course, been made illegal (I’ll try to find the rule in a second, something about the ball having to cross the opponents finish line before it crosses your own again)
Yeahh. when they were doing it in the game animation it was just to roll it back so he could get more points by placing it on top, you wouldn’t get points for knocking that ball down again.