Based on our prototyping activity, we have noticed that the Ringer tubes included in the kit of parts don’t take much interaction to pop. I would predict that there will be a number of deflated tubes during this game.
Anyone else have this same experience?
We have only inflated one so far. But having thrown it around and played with it, it seems fairly durable. However we have not used it with metal so a robot could easily smash it or pop it if you arent careful.
Some of us were throwing the two tubes we have at our rack to see how difficult it would be to toss a tube onto it (it’s hopeless, really), and one of them hit the brace for the light at the top. It’s now got some very stylish green duct tape to show off its battle scar.
Not sure how we punctured it exactly, but somewhere along in the prototyping our tube has sprung a rather large leak.
It looks like this will be a rather large factor in the games…
team 1086 were also trying to throw the tube onto the rack from the controller station(which someone did once!!) and it developed a slow leak.
~Alex~
Over the wall, too? Our guys were all excited because they could make it once in a while, until I pointed out that there’ll be a 6 and a half foot wall in front of them.
whell with a person holding their hands above their heads in front of them.
~Alex~
Thanks for tape, our tube is back to normal. I think it was cut on some metal.
Somehow both of our tubes have survived, i don’t know how really
One has some battle scars but they aren’t from testing.
All of our tubes are alive and well, but other then use them as chairs we haven’t done anything that could possibly damage them.
After going through lots of testing, both of our tubes are popped. I will not be surprised if most of the tubes at regionals will develop a “slow leak”. I am sure there will be hundreds of extra tubes, but it will be hard for the re-setters to find ones that have a leak, and replace them.
Because of that our team is making our manipulator adjustable so that we can account for partially deflated tubes.
Best thing I can tell yous… debur your edges… maybe add a couple layers of tape to any metal edge that might come in contact with a tube.
We only inflated one tube so far, so we guarantee that we’ll have another until we order some more. 
Not yet but the pop sound is coming!
We have been lucky in this department so far. Probably because all of our prototypes are made out of wood and not metal. It will be important for your manipulator to be able to pick up partially deflated tubes.
Or completely deflated tubes, since it is just a likely that that will happen is there is a big enough puncture. We actually hid one of the tubes from the rest of the team unitl we saw that they weren’t playing around with them dangerously, so we “found” the second one for testing. So far, no holes.
Hmm… we haven’t popped any.
We’ve been prototyping our manipulator, motor and all, and we still haven’t popped any. What are we doing wrong… or right?
We haven’t popped any and we are trying to order more just in case. I’m surprised due to the sharp edges on our manipulator prototypes.
we were playing with our old robots with it and we havnt had problems with them yet. Maybe our kids that blew them up have strong air?