So we’re working on our climber now, and it struck us how incredibly ghetto (jurry-rigged, cheap, unrefined etc.) it is.
Ours has ground-down bolts, nuts used as spacers, angle ground gearboxes, a wrench as a ratchet, rubber bands, bent steel bars, ground down hex shafts a seatbelt, and generally a lot of crap. Here’s pictures:
Anyways I don’t have the best hopes for our end-game this year (even if its my fault).
What’s the most ghetto thing you’ve seen on your robot?
I have personally built far more janky robot parts than those and won events with said janky robot. Driving a janky robot very well is far better than driving a top tier robot poorly.
Any pictures? Just curious 
We got a fair amount of driving practice in before bag and tag, but this is my first time driving mecanum, and we have a pretty bad weight imbalance screwing with our strafing. Still hoping for a fun regional next week though, I’ll drive my best!
In 2014, we had a linear ballista-style ball launcher that used really fat latex tubing. We were running into concerns about the wear and tear on the tubing because it only wrapped around two 1/4 bolts, and there was probably upwards of 150+ pounds of tension in the launcher when retracted. So yes, lots of pressure on a little surface.
It was evident that lubricant was necessary, but as the material was latex, we had to opt for water-based lubricant since oil-based lubricants degrade latex. Well, the only water-based lubricants available near the regional were in the form of personal lubricants at the nearby drug stores and supermarkets.
In our pit for the rest of the event, we had a tube of Astroglide covered with red duct taped and labeled “Secret Sauce.” We applied a fresh coat to the latex tubing before every match.
Not sure if it’s the kind of “ghetto” you’re looking for, but it’s certainly an unexpected fix to a problem. Worked like a charm, though.
In 2013, our design was to have the robot drive to the HP station, be fed frisbees, and hold onto the frisbees until the endgame, where we would scale the pyramid and dump the frisbees into the top of the pyramid for points. The collector for the frisbees broke during the Quals of Colorado, and we ended up fixing it with duct tape and a Team Driven t-shirt.
We applied white lithium grease to the surgical tubing bundle of our 2014 bot. It kept disappearing so we kept adding more, worked fine all season.
Edit: also at our first event we had to C-clamp a major component(without it we couldn’t shoot properly) into place after it broke, we then proceeded to run 2 perfect cycles back to back at Inland Empire with a seriously crippled robot.
I don’t know about anyone else, but personally, I find the phrase “most ghetto thing” offensive.
Invite conversation about shoddy construction and poor taste if you want to, but to equate it to anything that comes out of poor urban areas reeks of classism and racism. It has no place here.
Dear Craftsman tools,
I am very disappointed in my 1/2" Craftsman ratchet. It doesn’t perform nearly as I expect when jury-rigged into an FRC component. I’d like to claim on my lifetime warranty.
…
Dear FRC team,
Although we appreciate your talent and unique use case. We can’t provide a replacement for a use we clearly did not intend.
Just gonna bump this. “Ghetto” being used to describe something negatively or of poor craftsmanship has a strong history of classism and racism. There are many, many other words out there that could have been used instead of “ghetto”, and part of making FIRST more inclusive and welcoming to PoC and people from low income areas (which is what teams are looking for, or should be looking for), is eliminating language like this and using it in this way.
Come on dude everyone knows what he means with ghetto do be so critical about it.
I have a friend from a team that describes how sketchy an idea/solution is by removing letters from the word “sketchy.” I’ve been a part of teams that got down to what I would consider “ske.”
And yeah, no need to refer to badly-made robots parts as ghetto. There are plenty of other words that less people will find offensive that one can use.
Come on dude, language changes and we learn to be more respectful of experiences that aren’t our own as time goes by.
The most (insert non-racist word here) hack I’ve seen was 1646 in 2008 at Great Lakes regional. They built a ball herding lap runner and a fast one at that… and during eliminations their mechanism broke to the point of requiring removal, and that caused all sorts of weight distribution issues. OK, what to do? Add weight, obviously… but what to add? Obviously they couldn’t add extra CIMs or batteries (the latter was more obvious then than in 2014), so they had to go for the next heaviest thing in the pits, tools! Wrenches, a drill press vice, you name it, they added it to the front of the robot to get the weight back. They didn’t advance to finals, but it was still funny to look at.
I still have the crescent end of a combo ratchet/crescent wrench that we used to make a gearbox addition in order to prevent backdriving of a motor at all times. The funny part was that at first we installed the wrench the wrong way, meaning that it had to be taken completely apart (a not so kind procedure) before being reinstalled.
There was a part last year on our robot, which held the end of a Dart actuator in place, that was meant to be CNC milled. It was a small part that was to be made from box tubing with precision, not thinking about the small surface area of the part, I attempted to run it on a CNC mill with a tape plate (3 of the 4 sides had to be cut, hence the tape plate). One loudly thrown part later, I decided that manual machining would be precise enough since we did not have enough time to machine a fixture for the part at that point in the build season. Thus was born the “TNC” (Tyler Non-numerically Controlled) bracket, a part which could only be described as “passable” after using a belt sander to attempt to shape the part from a rectangular piece of box tubing down to the teardrop shape specified in the CAD model. It was eventually replaced after two regional events worth of abuse caused it to begin to buckle (I later postulated that techniques used such as “using a vice to mash it back to square” and “beating on it with a hammer” did not result in it having the highest measure of structural integrity), but while it was on the robot it fairly evident that it did not belong despite the fact that it worked.
I just had to address a student about this exact issue in the pits at Kettering last week. She was addressing a cable ran to the second floor via a ladder with caution tape wrapped around it. My exact words to her were “unless there’s 7 hungry families living in that ladder, you need to find a different word to describe it.”
It’s not about being politically correct, it’s about being inclusive and approachable. (I hope) you wouldn’t call someone acting in an undesirable manner gay for the same reason that you shouldn’t call the crap you put on your robot ghetto. In doing so you let those who are gay and those who actually live in the ghetto know that they are undesirable and that they are crap respectively.
Maybe something like “improvised” could be more suitable to discuss a topic like this.
Yes, we know what he means. But it is time that society breaks away from these traditional and disrespectful terms and descriptions. We are well into the 21st century, lets not condone these sort of descriptions any where, let alone in the FIRST community.
Also many teams struggle with limited resources, let’s not take away the pride that they feel when they have finished building their robot, even though it may not live up to some peoples standards. While you may see it as okay, to be submitting photos of parts on your own robots, teams which may be proud of their ability to utilise that tool or part in that way also look at CD
Our 2013 robot, designed to be a 30-point climber, never worked due to poor engineering and a lack of any tangible top-level design. We missed our first couple of qualifications matches just trying to get the thing to pass inspection, and the climbing mechanism was destroyed a couple matches later in a collision with another robot. We ended up building a simple 10-point climber that was held together entirely by zip ties that we broke at the beginning of the match, allowing the robot to climb at the be beginning of the match and literally nothing else. If we tried to do defense, the zip ties would fail prematurely and remove any ability for is to score points. (Un)fortunately,I am not aware of any existing photographs or videos of said robot.
Our 2014 entry was far more effective, but looked even more poorly constructed:
Ignoring the possible offense of the term used (and noting in passing that I have heard far more offensive terms that mean the same thing), here are a few examples of creative use of products:
There was a rookie robot at Bayou in 2014 (Aerial Assist) which was largely constructed of scrap metal, such as old road signs. The goalie riser was particularly shocking, but up close, all the rough edges were knocked down and it was a slick piece of work on an extreme budget.
The second iteration of our boulder pickup this year used a Home Depot “Homer Bucket” cut off to about 12" tall and “dissected like a frog” to both help bring the boulder to the centerline of the robot and ensure a clean pour into the launcher. Iterations 3, 4, and 5 have returned to all aluminum and/or polycarb construction, but none have centered the ball as cleanly as #2.
Our 2013 Ultimate Ascent climbing slide was rather curious. A CIM was mounted in a piece of angle which was mounted to a T-hinge, and drove a timing belt sheave directly. The other end of the timing belt drove a “lead screw” composed of threaded rod and a coupling nut. The [STRIKE]gh[/STRIKE] interesting bit was how the belt was tensioned by a turnbuckle hooked into the last hole on the t-hinge. The carriage that this lead screw drove rode on flanged bearings against an inverted rail of aluminum angle. It looked like junk, but it was one of the few mechanical systems of our 2013 robot that did not fail at Bayou.
Well, some people interpret things differently. It all depends on your point of view. I wouldn’t say they are considering it as a racist word, more as a word, when taken out of context, could be offensive to others.
CD is more of a formal forums when it comes to FIRST robotics - r/FRC would possibly be more accepting of the word, though I wouldn’t suggest using it there in the first place.
A counter argument to this is that most of what is actually being described and discussed on topic in this thread has a prominent emphasis of fond feelings for said robot components, how they came to be, and what made them special to us. There are plenty of negative terms that exist that are used in a positive context, as I feel was the intent of the OP. My personal example was that even if its built like crap from a rough build season that makes no difference on its final performance, what you do with it is the part that matters.
Such as building an Einstein field worthy robot out of a leaky shipping container with a 3 phase wiring job that would make any licensed electrician scream in horror. Yes our build practices were sub-par, but that did nothing to deter us from rebuilding practically our whole robot and practicing like mad to be on even footing with the best and the greatest.
**
Edit: I feel that the term “Janky” has the closest feel and meaning to what OP was going for, let’s all just agree to use that and carry on with this thread as intended before it gets any further derailed. Let’s just use this as a learning experience.**