How do teams that have been in this for a couple of years deal with pas year robots-
our 1st year was 2000 and we took that robot apart because it gave its all duirng a post season runabout and went to the junkyard in the sky
what do teams do with their old robots??
dahl
497
Most of our “ancient” robots were stripped for parts, down to the very frame, which remains in our Practice Facility for now.
Our robot…hmmm our last year robot is in a storage room in our school basement with all these junk our school keeps. I guess our school thinks our robot is junk.
Jeff Wong
Its so hard to “scrap” past year robots… 
We work so hard for 6 weeks to design and build the thing. Then we try our best to win with it. And at the end of the season we say, “thanks for the memories… good bye”.
It is for the greater good though, next year’s robot needs this year’s “brain”. At least part of the robot will always lives on. 
Steve Prairie
RAGE 173
R.I.P “Hanging Dragon” - 2000
We keep our old robots intact after the competitions, but we don’t do anything with them. They just collect dust and serve as reminders of how stupid we were in our first couple years
At least once in the 3 years that I have been doing this, team 177 has fired up every machine from '96 on for prototyping, driver training or sparring. This year we constructed a practice machine from the base of the '97 machine, the arm from the '98 machine, and part of the end-effector from the '99 machine. You can see it behind our twin machine in the included picture.
P.J.
We took apart our 98 and 99 robots for scrap. The 97 robot is probably in storage somewhere at JPL, at least that was the last I heard about it.
We saved last year’s robot and practiced balancing with it for a few weeks, until we killed the drive system. We decided it wasn’t worth fixing, so the robot is basically dead.
We scrapped parts from our first robot. But after that, we keep the old ones around for practice, and as a reminder to the past for us, and to show the newcomers where we came from.
We have a Technokat “Museum” of robots from the past years. They are all lined up right at the enterance of our shop. Also we use some of them for testing.
Clark
Until this year, the previous year’s robot was scrapped and scavenged for parts. But Spike 3 (last year’s robot) did so well (winning both the Mid-Atlantic Regional and the Philadelphia Alliance Regional) that no one wanted to scrap it. So Spike 3 lives on, and just yesterday we demonstrated both Spike 3 and Spike 4. And I got to drive for a while. 
Hey, this edit feature is fun!
Well,
I can say from expirence that I wish that our team had kept our robots intact. Of course I know that nobody every uses old robot parts for the current robot cuz that would just be against the rules. However, for various reasons, our 1996 robot got dismantled. It was never returned to it’s full glory and working state…right now it is mearly a display piece in FIRST Place…and I doubt as if it will ever be in the hands of a Blue Lightning team member again. While I do like the fact that it is being honored in FIRST Place…the only way u’d ever know it’s story is if someone who knew it were there to tell you. So I hope that teams out there who have championship robots will keep them intact, and perhaps even find a place of honor for them. I admire the teams who have like thier last 7 robots functioning, or @ least still physically intact and lined up on thier practice field…I think that is very cool. Alas though Hexcalibur is but a mere memory now…that can be visited @ FIRST Place.
-Justin
When I was still with 69, I saw most of our old bots stripped to give life to the new prototypes of the upcoming season. Sometimes they made it back mostly together, but they always looked like a mess from their former glory. This one, the 1998 (my baby!) took the brunt of the dismemberment to give life to the 1999 “Trashcan”.
http://members.dencity.com/jasiri177/sharpie98.jpg
1998 Boston Museum of Science Demonstration
*Originally posted by Lora Knepper *
**When I was still with 69, I saw most of our old bots stripped to give life to the new prototypes of the upcoming season. Sometimes they made it back mostly together, but they always looked like a mess from their former glory. This one, the 1998 (my baby!) took the brunt of the dismemberment to give life to the 1999 “Trashcan”.http://members.dencity.com/jasiri177/sharpie98.jpg
1998 Boston Museum of Science Demonstration **
TRASHCAN?!?
How could you call Sharpie 2000 a “trashcan”???
Matt — the 1998 bot was torn apart more than the rest. The 1999 (the year right after 1998…) was the year of the “trashcan on treads” … I mean really…that’s what it looked like, and what even the engineers called it!
http://members.dencity.com/jasiri177/sharpie99.jpg
“The Trashcan on Treads - 1999 (Sharpie II)”
We were good with the floppies though
~ lora
Well, we’ve been a mixed bag.
1996, We have the main front panel remaining.
1997 is still in it’s final form from 1997’s Rumble at the Rock. Many pieces. (a harder fought second place I have yet to see, we came with a robot, and left with 3 very large peices)
1998 was dismantled to help prototype 1999. Only the side panels remain.
1999 is pretty close to final form, minus a brains.
2000 is in final form, and was used to spar against 2001
2001 is now on the lecture circuit, milking the school system for new team member before they even hit High School.
The robots, and what’s left of them, are at a new room that our team secured from a closed school in our school system. I’m thinking it’s our new build room.
Actually, we were requested if we could donate 1999 to First place about 2 years ago. I wonder if the offer is still open, Because the current team members feel we should have.
PS, this is my first post also
Our 1999 robot is over at Naugatuck Valley Community College being reverse engineered by the CAD students…we went to go check on their progress at one point, and they had put the scissor mechanism into the computer (this lifted the hopper of floppies)…it was really spiffy to see it go up & down on the computer.
The 2000 robot, dubbed by one of the mechanical students “Its my baby” (after its UTC win) is sitting in storage where we built this year, which was actually an old business that made carnival games (with its specialty, Rock-em, sock-em robots ), among other things. From what I know, the thing is still intact, minus a few speed controllers.
The 2001 robot is in the presentation circuit for the moment (yet we’re not really explaining the game to the people we present to to save confusion)…we just did a promo at Cheshire HS in Cheshire, CT, who from what I can tell will be a very blessed team from the get-go (the school board loves them, they have teachers involved & seed money, and their principal used to be principal in South Windsor, where 177 resides…this is much more than we ever had)
Thats all for now, wow…that was a long post.
We have kept most of our robots intact. Buzz’s 1 & 2 are gone but Buzz 3-6 are still in our Robot room at school. It’s always fun to look at the old robots and see what we can do to improve upon a previous idea!!
It was hard letting go of our first robot (The Steel Falcon '99) beacause naturally it was our first robot. We just ran out of storage space for it. But last years robot (POS '00) was a different story. All that robot did was cause us trouble and hardships. I was pleased when I personally Destroyed it. I don’t think we will ever get rid of our robot from this year (The Beefeater '01) because it is the first robot that we have had success with. After placing 3rd, 1st, 2nd, winning 2 Delphi awards, 1 judges award, and 1 leadership in controll award, I thought that we should keep this thing around for a while
We have keep our last three robots togather but the first year we where in first we scrape it. (’:(’)
And if we do need parts we try to take things that are not going to be used on that robot and use them.
*Originally posted by Lora Knepper *
**Matt — the 1998 bot was torn apart more than the rest. The 1999 (the year right after 1998…) was the year of the “trashcan on treads” … I mean really…that’s what it looked like, and what even the engineers called it!http://members.dencity.com/jasiri177/sharpie99.jpg
“The Trashcan on Treads - 1999 (Sharpie II)”
We were good with the floppies though
~ lora **
Ack!!! Sorry, I had the 2000 robot in mind when you said “trashcan”. I understand what you mean by that now. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
