Week 6, our robot is in its final configuration and ready to be crated up and shipped to the Bayou Regional. This weekend was spend putting the robot back together after some more tweaking during the week.
We changed our arm over to pneumatics instead of motor, and did some serious weight savings trimming, and of course started to pretty the robot up and practice, practice, practice. Finally we got our deployment mechanism for the minibot on the robot.
This video is a build season in review, in pictures and includes one of our better practices. (We practice in 2 minute increments, hanging as many tubes as possible and then moving to minibot deploy. The minibot was not in these videos.)
Great looking robot. Looks a lot like ours! Congratulations on getting “done” (not that you are ever truly done) early. Getting practice for your drivers and getting through the first round of debugging and upgrading puts you in a great position going into your regional. I’m sure you will do well.
Wow! When it picked up the tube I thought, “*OK, so this robots is one of those low ones that can only go up to the middle. That’s nice, and might be really…*Whoa! Did that just put it on the top peg?!”
It is basic tile floor. It is the cafeteria, common area for our high school. We don’t have a large build space, just a classroom that is in use for history so we have to clean up each night and the other mentor’s garage full of machines. We get the common area on the weekend to actually get the robot out and practice.
We have run it on a piece of carpet so we know how it will steer and drive on the carpet, so the practice is more about letting the driver familiarize himself with tank drive again and to practice hanging in front of the driver station.
You guys improve every year, and you won Bayou last year… So…
Thanks Chris_is_me, we try to get better each year, and the last two year’s trips to the Championship has really given us some good data and information. This year we decided to go with as fast as a scorer as our resources and time allowed and of course we’re focusing hardcore on our mini-bot right now since it can win the game by itself if the opposing team doesn’t have any.
This year is like 2007, you have to have two decent minibots (like a single ramp in 2007) in order to have an even playing field for the actual scorers to matter. I was on a team that did ramps that year and now we are looking at the other side of the equation and I think the minibots are worth too much in my opinion. I am sure scorers said the same about Rack and Roll though so we’ll see how the games play out.
I love seeing all the reveals this week and smacking my head on how we could have improved here, or tweaked there, and then I am thankful for the withholding allowance to hopefully get some more coolness on our bot at the Bayou.
