This is a picture of our prototype robot taken today. It’s in a stage where it can collect and toss. We still have a lot of tweaking and a few additions. More information and video can be found on our Blog.
Wow it looks great! And from what I see works very well. Now how much does it weigh?
We’re weighing it again this afternoon since we have added the MiniCIMs since the last time. The last weight we had was 117 with the battery. Our competition robots chassis is 5-6lbs lighter then the practice robot. When everything is added we should be right at about 120lbs. We’ll have to find some weight for lights though.
We weighed it a couple hours ago, 117.4 lbs without battery. Our competition robot should be right at about 110lbs in this configuration.
i’m assuming heavily inspired by boom bone?
Yes Boom Done was very inspirational, as well as team Neutrino’s butterfly modules from last year, many team’s sheet metal work (148, 118, 971), and many many other robots and people.
Thank you to everyone that has shared ideas with the community, some of them we liked so we adapted them and put them on our robot.
Spectrum’s robots keep getting better and better every year. Your latest is clearly very well thought out. All the subsystems look well integrated and effective. It is as elegant and sophisticated as the robots built by a certain team to the southeast but without the excess complexity. It also looks like your drivers have been practicing a lot already.
See you in Dallas and at Lone Star.
Thanks for the compliments Phil,
It looks like we won’t be using mecanum wheels after all this year.
We had one break today after not much use. More information on our blog.
How did you bend your tube and What material did you use?
Sorry to hear about the bad day you and your team had, Allen. I have no doubt that you all have the fortitude to keep on working so that you have a bunch of good days.
After searching CD, I found a few instances of the same sort of thing happening with the larger Vex mecanums though they seem to have occurred after much more use and abuse. Is there any chance that there is any way to free up the binding rollers? I will take a look on Monday but, unfortunately, they look like they are not meant to be disassembled for servicing once they leave the factory.
I am starting to notice a trend here, the people who are having issues with the vex mecanum wheels are the people who are using 8 motors on their drive. (the only instances I can think of are Boom Done and Spectrum)
1/2" EMT Conduit and a conduit bender. The bender is about $40 dollars and 10 feet of conduit is under $2 for us locally. We bought about 60 ft so we could screw up a bunch as we learned to bend it well.
We had read those as well, we had assumed we would be replacing the wheels after our two regionals and before championship/off-seasons. I didn’t expect to have to change a wheel after one week. It’s partly our fault, we wanted to believe.
That’s interesting, I don’t see why that would cause the problem, but I’m also done putting time and thought into Mecanum wheels. I wasn’t on the Mecanum bandwagon before this season and I definitely jumped clean off of it last night. Maybe we’ll find out it it was our fault, I don’t know but for now it’s not worth the hassle.
I spoke with Paul and Aren at VEX this morning and they let me in on what caused the problem with 4" Mecanum wheels.
VEX shipped the 4" Mecanum hubs with the rollers for the 6" Mecanum wheels as a stop gap since the 4" rollers weren’t ready. The 4" rollers are apparently in Greenville now and will be shipping out to all the teams that had previously ordered 4" Mecanum wheels.
The only real issue with all this is they didn’t tell anyone they were doing this. So we wasted a whole lot of week 4 playing around with wheels that aren’t round. Now we have decide if we want to switch back to actually round mecanum wheels or stay with the omni wheels that we put on our chassis yesterday.