I would love to hear what your team is “planning” to do for the coming year. In the face of supply chain shortages, I’m sure teams who normally try to showcase their bot or use it for outreach will be reconsidering this strategy this year. Yes, I know this is CD and may not be representative of the population, and yes, I know plans do change, but I would love to hear the reason why you choose to to scrap/reuse vs hold intact and if it’s a hard decision.
Simple enough:
What, if anything, do you strip from ur robot?
Nothing: We barely touch it.
Minor things: Vision System, IMUs, RIOs.
Medium things: Intake wheels/axles, flywheels, a motor here or there.
Major things: Swerve Modules, Gear Boxes.
Die, Robot Die: Reuse EVERYTHING.
0voters
For 3630, this year, we are trying to keep the robot in tact as much as possible. It’s a great demo robot and helpful for our outreach programs. We’ll circle back and let you know when we change our minds :).
We keep the old competition bots completely intact. Then mid season we need a few more motors and some bots loose their parts.
2015 is just a frame now. 2016 was too hard to work with and our most successful bot at the time so it’s basically intact. 2017,18,20,21 are all mostly complete. 2019 just got repaired so it’s actually getting programmed and run.
As soon as we’re done with fall offseasons*, the robot is STRIPPED. I mean, the robot ends up looking like it fell into a piranha pool of students with wrenches and allen keys and screwdrivers. All major mechanisms, all electronics, everything but the drivetrain comes off. We don’t have room to keep old robots around nor do we have enough funding to be able to buy all new parts year on year.
* But most likely a while into build when enough members are bored that it happens. We’ve had mostly-stripped robots sitting around for a while before.
We might have a unique situation (or not?), but we dismantled all of our old robots during fall training last year. That was our 2014, 2016, 2017, 2019 and 2020 robots. I know some teams would shudder at dismantling old bots, but the current team had zero connection to them, and we have plenty of photos and videos of their operation to reference.
We kept the 2020/2021 drive base pretty much intact for testing, but all structures were gone.
We harvested quite a lot of shaft collars, flanged hex bearings, square and rectangular tubing, and misc. lengths of thunderhex shaft. Made prototyping 2022 bot way easier to have so much used materials around. AND it freed up a lot of volume in our limited work space.
2022 bot is still being used for demonstrations, and will be used for programming training along with the 2020 base. So 2022 will keep all of its functionality… for at least a year.
Normally we strip bots down for parts, our 2022 bot won’t be because it was our best robot by far and won states with it. We plan on setting it up to do 3 point shots at pep rallies
Yep. I hate to tear apart new robots but unless market conditions improve and control system components are easier to come by, this year’s robot will be harvested.
This year will stay intact because we want to use it as a demo bot, and the drivetrain neos that are on there have been used for at least 3 full comp seasons.
We are going to replace the two falcons with neos after our offseason comp.
This is very different from normal because we normally take apart robots. The only other robot we kept was 2018 (3rd place in worlds) which was our demo bot before and will now be in a display case outside the lab.
The only robot 292 has kept completely intact is the 2003 Newton Division winning bot. It still functions, we just don’t seem to have the stuff needed to drive it/don’t completely understand the technology that’s as old as we are.
Last year’s bot is still special to us because of how much it retaught everyone, and we’re going to keep it around as an extra working robot for driving practice, defense practice, maybe programming, etc. and also for the July 4h parade.
Now, our 2020 bot that only faced a single competition is a different story… All brushless motors, motor controllers, expensive electronics, etc. were removed, but we still kept it mostly mechanically intact. This is fairly normal for our past bots, except for our rookie year (2014) robot that we will always keep running. We did a major overhaul on it to current electronics about 3 years ago as a summer project. That big exercise ball flying through the air is a crowd pleaser; it’s our primary demo/outreach bot.
We did originally plan to keep at least the Rapid React drivetrain around so we would have something for the drivers and programmers while mechanical was working however the supply chain issues especially the availability of Falcons means it comes fully appart.
I hope we keep this year’s robot intact atleast through the next season. Our robot from infinite recharge on the other hand… it’s a skeleton at this point.
We don’t have the space to keep old robots. We use it as a test bench through the fall, then somewhere around December we strip it for reusable parts and scrap the rest.
This will most likely be the first robot we have ever planned to keep completely* put together, it also helps that shooting big tennis balls puts on a good show.
This is exactly our feelings as well! I think the infinite recharge robot would have put on a better show if the game pieces were more consistent and less prone to wear.
Ours is already completely dismantled, it sucks because it was so successful but we need the electronics. We have been building up our sponsor program in recent years so I’m hoping we can start keeping them intact. Storage is another problem however.