Our team has a no-so-little box of ‘memories’ at our shop - bent screws, melted plastic bits, burnt out motors, snapped clamps, degreaser-melted solo cups, etc. that all have a story attached. We bring it to competitions, and if the judges ever ask a fun/learning/mistake question, we whip it out. It’s also just fun to go through. My favorite one is a little bit of churro we were cutting that flew off the mitre saw, hit the light switch, and turned off all the lights in the shop, leaving me standing there very confused until I had realized what happened. Didn’t do that again.
What would be your best items if you had a ‘memory box’?
10 fingers, 4 arms, 2 legs, and 1 head.
In our “trophy case” (loosely so called) are:
4 different awards from other teams, our original climber hook with a sticker that says “Einstein bound”, our hatch grabber that fell off on the field and got us in trouble, a deck of cards nailed to a board (RIP eucher), a Rookie Inspiration Trophy
I can’t speak for my team, but for me personally…
Multiple broken 3d printed “flowers” to pick up gears, broken dog gears from our 2017 bot and the motor mount I hammered into shape. Broken strips of our 2016 euroboard bellypan and a very bent defense pin from the rockwall. Plus a gamepiece from every game since I joined FIRST from fRC and FTC.
We have most of our polycarb with sponsor stickers placed in front of the windows and a few things we couldn’t recycle from our robots like the chassis from 2017, elevator from 2018, hatch grabber 2019. One thing I took was an angle bracket that I taped on our arm last year to be able to start with a hatch panel since our regular mechanism couldn’t start with one. It’s just funny to me and reminds me that there can be really simple solutions that work just fine.
I’m a rookie, so I’ll have many more, but for this year (and this is just me personally) I would pick a drill bit I accidentally snapped in half, the melted pieces of plastic from when we ran our shooter just a little too fast, a cowboy hat, a coffee maker (don’t ask), the Chairman’s script I doodled all over, a 3d printed cone from off season, a gear-shaped piece of wood (lovingly named “spider-gear”), and a torn up power cell.
I had to dremel a bearing out because I had hammered it in backwards and the hole was too tight.
Broken taps
How about a stack of bearings that have the oil boiled out of them from being in the bot when it was welded?
This year it would be our broken axles from LA North. That’s what we get for putting e-clip grooves on the drive axles, I guess.
This axle… The gold plate is in there to show how not straight the axle is. I think we probably had about 5 other of these. This was from our 2019 Climber and us test driving it with no limit switches while it is powered by 4 775 pros on a 650:1
Iron Kings, 2017.
Fortunately, being sponsored by AndyMark and only about 15 minutes away at the time, new AM14U3 plates were received quickly (and cut to the proper length).
That’s an amazing failure. Keep that one around for sure!
It reminds me of this part from our 2020 build. I have no idea how this happened.
I think the only adequate response to this is “oof”.
Also up there: Los Pollos Locos, 2013.
That wasn’t even our PWM cable. Just someone’s sucked into our belts, leaving our already-miserable drivetrain stricken in one of the few matches where it worked okay.
I think I still have that cable somewhere, still with the belt tooth profile bent into it. I should give it back to 2815 sometime.
The bathroom plaque from my first FLL tournament we didn’t get any trophies, so we asked the organizers what they were going to do with the plaques afterwards they said -“nothing” so we proceeded to collect all the plaques from the venue
The hex banana. I won’t elaborate.
From a trophy perspective? I wish I had a picture of it handy, but back in 2013 we won the very prestigious Machine Shop Award at the Greater Kansas City Regional, “for judicious use and full attention of the Machine Shop throughout the competition.”
We practically had them recut full sized Pyramid hanging arms out of Al sheet on a bandsaw. They worked though.
We have a robot graveyard where our welded/sheetmetal frames rest. Mock mining tunnel that was sealed up and is only accessible by taking the creepiest detour through another tunnel through a thin metal door. It’s super fun to show freshmen because they get a little shaky, and it’s a great place to relive old memories. Don’t think it’s portable enough to take to competition though.
We do have some fun odd bits lying around our bins, like the colson wheels that started off 3" diameter and ended with a 1 1/2" diameter by the end of the 2019 season