Robot Moving Day

The FIRST robotics team is starting its 6th season.  From crazy, improv beginnings it is growing into a more sophisticated - yet still fun loving - organization.  But we've outgrown our childhood home.

From the start we've been meeting and building at one of our sponsors.  They've been great and have helped us a lot.  And to some extent, we've helped them.  They hire our best, be they students or in one case a coach.  They are making some of the best CNC equipment on the planet and now need the space that was for five years an outstanding robot building facility.

So time to move.  Not just that, we need to toss out lots of old stuff, organize everything and pack it into containers so that somebody can actually find things.  For a while now that has been one of my few useful abilities.....I can eventually figure out where anything is hiding.  Sometimes I did have to meditate for a day or two.

Here's some of the "stuff" we had to deal with:

Oh and there's more.  So very much more.

I went in on Friday afternoon for a few hours of solitary work.  Every bin and tub was opened up and things moved into more or less logical piles.  Pneumatics over here.  A big pile of wheels over there.  Scrap metal.  Scrap wood.  Scraps of miscellaneous stuff.  Most was straightforward albeit a foreshadowing of much work yet to come.  But I did hit one lode of highly nostalgic stuff.  Artifacts from early seasons.  Most of them were polycarb panels that protected mechanisms on the robots.  That's where we put sponsor signs and the like.

Here's a remnant of our very first, very crude, very successful season one machine.

All the pioneers of robotics signed their names to it.  I stay in loose contact with many of them.  Then there are the odd little artifacts of obscure import.  What the heck was this all about?

Saturday morning it was time to dig in for real.  A small Covid-era subteam got together..

And got the job done.  Here's an end of day view.  Nothing left but some scrap wood and shelving that has yet to be dispatched.

It went pretty well, although the unload destination did not work out today so a trailer full of robot stuff is parked in my garage.  Adios Robot Home, we'll miss you.