Today is the day. The end of the build season and the beginning of the anticipation for the upcoming competitions. Robots go into their crates (or bags if you are in Michigan) until the first competition.
So how did you guys do? Did you finish over weight, under weight, or are you in panic mode right now:ahh: ?It has been an amazing, long build season but it was well worth it. I look forward to seeing you all at the competitions and good luck to all.
-Sam
Ship date is just the transition from build season to “we need to make the practice robot work NOW so the programmers can tweak automode and the students can drive the wheels off it” season.
Lets see… weight:
Electrical board: 13 lbs
Shooter + turret: 23 lbs
Robot: 83.5 lbs
Over read on the scale: about 3 lbs
Ability to remove weight if needed? 15 lbs of steel plate.
under the weight limit? check!
On a side note, we got a plastic pallet this year for the bottom of our crate… combine that with the withholding limit, and this is the lightest crate we’ve shipped yet!
Hmmm we shipped without any panic or worries. We were a half pound under weight. Hmmmm what can we put there to add weight.
team 2185 did pretty good…
Just before it shipped we blew a jaguar from our conveyor, so we will be buying some more jags for backups and bring it to waterloo… We also will be working on autonomous and possibly camera tracking since we kept our electronics board…
might be a bit over but i think by removing a few things we will be under and be ok…
Please be sure to contact Luminary Micro and notify them of all the operating conditions under which the failure occurred. This will help them diagnose the problem.
yea i am doing that right now actually just going to take some pictures now so that they can see it…
Umm do you guys think that we should just buy some victors instead of jags or do u think that buying 4 extra would suffice?
Just some general advice…this also goes for regional scouting for those involved:
What did you do in the days/hours leading up to ship? Were you still building your robot? Did you practice at all? What kinds of autonomous (for us vintage FIRSTers) mode strategies did you get in by the ship date? Where is your robot overall, as opposed to 100% of where you think you need to be going into regionals? If the calibration changes on the scales (which happens a lot after ship), will you have to make major changes? Are you shipping the bot in full or in pieces?
Believe it or not, the answers you will get to these questions automatically tells you which teams to keep a major eye on (both good and bad) during competition. If any major construction beyond normal maintenance is done in the pits or a small…it may also be a more telling sign.
Good luck, relax, and have an age-appropriate drink!
We had to drop about 7 pounds of code yesterday, but we’re good now. Everythings good.
We were driving and scoring with the (half prototype) robot by week 4, but we were still building the final robot an hour before it went in the crate. Programming was ongoing all during build, and we have some autonomous code doing what we think it needs to do. The robot is complete. We have a lot of other stuff to do besides FRC for the next couple weeks, since most of the FRC team is also on two FTC teams, and the regional for that is less than two weeks away. So we’ll open up the box at our first regional and do what needs to be done…hopefully that involves learning how to drive with 5 other robots on the field, and some program tweaking.
Our scale has always been within a tenth of a pound of the official scale, so our weight being 118.9 is probably going to be ok…
Kilroy did pretty good this year; for the first time in a while, we have nothing major to change on the robot when we get to competitions.
The crate was picked up at 2:30 today.
Robot weight: 117 lbs
Total crate weight: 389 lbs.
We had a mix-up when Fed-Ex arrived, (shipping manager called called fed-ed express instead of freight because that is who he uses) and our stickers were mixed up on the BOL paperwork, but all was good in the end. The Fed-Ex driver has been picking up FIRST teams’ crates in this area for years. He exemplified GP to us and we are grateful to Fed-Ex. Thanks Rudy!
It’s a little late now, but the stickers need to match the number at the top left of the BOL.
Here are a few links to how 1523 spent their 6 weeks. Enjoy!