I’ve been looking about the web and found some pretty odd things built with FRC parts, including a robotic couch, mecanum forklifts, and more. What’s the coolest non-competition object you’ve seen made entirely or partially with FRC parts?
(my personal favorite goes to the couch)
Driving Tank-Drive with a Wii Fit Balance Board is always a blast
^This would be the coolest off season project ever. ^
Okay, you have my attention…
Robotic furniture? Paging Devin (also known as “RoboChair”)…
The Versa Franken-Frame has to be up there somewhere:
Its really not that hard to do. In the past ive used software called glove pie. It takes inputs from Wiimotes and Wii balance boards and can output as a keyboard, mouse, or emulated joystick. Glove pie has a built in code generator but it can only go so far. The syntax is very straight forward and the documentation isn’t bad.
This is exactly how I did it.
You use GlovePIE to find the Wii Balance Board details, send it to the RoboRIO over Open Sound Control and viola.
I also did a project using the Kinect, driving the robot by moving your hands up and down to control the throttle of each side.
Our champbot was built mostly with FRC parts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTUfxL1B0KM
Out of date speed controllers, motors, pneumatics, etc.
It wasn’t entirely FRC legal parts, but I once built and FRC-style backpack compressor with an Arduino-controlled cooling fan that drew more power than the compressor itself at full blast… and generated about 1 pound of force of upward thrust. No, the backpack did not fly. But it did everything to increase that 9% duty cycle.
There was also the time I attempted to build and program a Segway-style drivebase for FRC, but never got that balancing loop programmed and tuned in right. However, that ADIS16448 worked like a charm. Maybe a degree of drift after 2 minutes, you couldn’t really see it.
It’s a robot, but not an FRC robot…and it turned into a movie…
Mostly FRC parts, excluding the flamethrower 
423 built a go cart robot that we used to drive around the halls during school and race kids running the track during gym. I personally built a ~1x2’ mecanum robot I used to drive in circles around people walking in the hallways and cause general confusion. School-wide wifi and security cameras meant I could drive it around from the other side of the school with fair visibility and a good wifi connection.
We have a recliner mounted on a mecanum base.
I’d really like to see that thing in action. It looks really cool.
Our first version of the go cart was basically a more ghetto version of that. We started with an old mecanum robot, took off all the manipulators, zip-tied on a folding chair, and drove around on it. It worked pretty well till one of the zip ties slipped and the driver and chair fell backwards off an accelerating robot. Yours looks a lot nicer.
