User:Rich Schuster

I'm the best person ever.

Links before the storm:

• My homepage!
• E-Mail - richtopia@gmail.com
• AIM - empofrichtopia
• Elephant Fortunes

And here is some of my infinite wisdom. You all must take heed, or else you will never even stand a chance of winning nationals.

My biggest mistake I ever made in robotics: Not changing the diameter of the spool in the finals. When you are sitting for half an hour and an idea pops into your head "oh, we can change the spool diameter to make it go faster, cuz the Thunderchickens can do all of the really high capping", go for it. That kind of a decision is what separates national winners from national finalists.

Don't you dare build a two wheel drive robot unless you have a really good reason for it. Two wheel drive has only a few advantages, and it's biggest is the weight. Some say it is easier to drive because of the lack of scrubbing, but no, it sucks. Granted, four wheel drive is heavy, but it makes life a lot easier. 2004 OCCRA would have been greatly helped by four wheel drive, keeping the weight low and always having drive wheels on the ground.

Low riding robots are cool, but be careful with what the game is. Victoria was low riding in the wrong places, with her front bumper looking something like this: ____P That let us get onto the goal's structure, and remain stuck there for the rest of the match. I added a piece of angle aluminum on the front bent at about 10 degrees outward and the problem practically disappeared.

Use small wheels. It is better in every way except when you have to drive over things. Look at the game, if there is objects to drive over, most of my advice is no good. But small wheels slow down the robot, which means you have less gears and less wheel. Less space is taken by the chains and gears this way, not to mention the weight. The smallest we have used it the 6" wheelchair wheels, but if you can find a nice pre-made smaller wheel, go ahead and try it out.

Siege mode is awesome. If you build a light robot, throw on siege mode. It is a pneumatic brake (a cylinder firing down to the floor with a friction pad attached), and brings up many interesting situations. With a brake that will never overheat, you can gear your robot to be faster and get away with only one CIM per side (which you should do anyways). If you get in a pushing match, fire the brake and let your opponent push away. Once they have burnt their motors up on you, you can then drive around them.

Never build 6 wheel drive. It is heavy and has no friction bonus compared to four wheel drive. Treaded drive is bad too, even heavier. The game must be really bumpy to justify treaded drive.

The kit transmission is sweet. If they stop giving it away, I have cad drawings for a very similar one. The kit frame on the other hand... that needs some work. It is nice, but is overkill. They chose a nice alloy of aluminium, and can take much more of a beating than most robots can provide. It is also shaped kinda weird, so it takes up more space than it need be. The first thing that you should do it cut off the tail to the side rails. What I mean is that the four rails that you put the wheels in between are too heavy. They have a U shape, and a extra part coming off one side of the U. The extra part is where the axle should go through for the standard kit robot. But that axel leaves the robot too high off the ground... so you will probably make your own mount anyways. That tail portion should be cut off, the U is overkill on it's own, and you would probably save maybe a pound from that alone. I feel that everywhere on the kit frame is too thick, but best leave the extra aluminium and be safe.

Don't be afraid to use too thick of axle material. My freshman year the robot fell apart due to thin axles (and lots of other flaws too). 3/8" is too small.

Tighten bolts. Use lock washers or nylocks. Check bolts regularly.

Washers 101. Washers are a pretty simple concept. You put them in between the nut and the material they are holding. Flat washers serve the purpose of distributing the load of the nut. So you use this when bolting to wood, so the nut dosen't rip into the wood. Also, thin metal takes washers. Larger washers distribute more load. The other type of washer is a lock washer. They are the screwie washers, the ones with a slit in them. They are sorta like a spring, they keep force on the nut. This makes sure that they don't fall off. Other alterniatives to a lock washer are nylocks and castle nuts, but you don't use castles ever. Lock washers need to be between metal and metal, so if you are bolding through wood, you have the lock between the nut and the flat washer. So an example order of a bolt through wood would be bolt head, flat washer, wood, wood, flat washer, lock washer, nut. And for alluminium alluminium mounts it would go bold head, alluminium, aluminium, lock washer, nut. Now don't let me see the robot fall apart due to vibrations!!!!!

Don't be afraid to scrap components of the robot, but be careful. Penelope would not have done nearly as well if we hadn't gotten out the sawsall Thursday night and made some irreversible changes.

Duct tape armor is a bad idea.

Don't hurt me John, but I have to say build the robot to play the game, not to the programmer's specifications. It is reasonable to make provisions for sensors, but when teams come in saying "well, we tried this nifty new technology and had the program working forever, although it doesn't really pertain to the game... and we lost... I'm going to go cry..." or something like that. I'm glad that I'm choosing to ignore when we did that in 2004, so I'm not ashamed by my team. I think that was grammatically incorrect. Well, if you didn't understand the point of that paragraph, you can email me for a more in depth explanation at youdontdeservetoknow@youfool.com.

Don't let Jerms hook up with girls at robotics. Especially now that we actually count on him.

Hook John up with a girl. He is really great at multitasking, and he has a light class load this year!

You guys had better go to Vegas. Chicago is another awesome competition. If I were you guys... I'd go to Vegas and Chicago, and if I did well there, I'd drag myself to nationals. The Wane state competition was nice... wait, no, screw niceties, it sucked. It was overcrowded (so help by leaving), in a pretty bad location (although that supermarket was slick), and the stands were some of the worst stands. I can assure Chicago has nice stadium seats (I went there last year). The nice thing about Wayne State was that you could drive there. Which brings me to Grand Rapids, one of the most boring towns in the country. It rivals Rochester on the boredom scale. And we had to bus there. We should have kept going and stayed at Chicago. It was a lot nice in the old stadium, where you didn't have to drive to Grand Valley. But now that the competition isn't even in the city, it is kinda pointless.