Finally! The final task is complete! For real this time.
I hear you saying "Wait, didn't you record a successful run of Tidy The Toys a couple of weeks ago?" Yes we did. Sort of...
Check out this photo from that "successful" run...
Notice anything funny about those cubes? Look closer...
Oho! What's that? A rubber band? Yes. It's a rubber band. All three cubes have rubber bands on them in the run we did at the end of May.
Is this cheating? Wellllllll, technically it isn't, and here's why:
When we were first building our forklift, we found that a Lego forklift isn't particularly good at lifting Lego cubes, at least not by pinching from the sides with the claw design. Lego sticks when it's supposed to stick, and slides when it's supposed to slide. With this claw design, we lacked grip.
Putting the rubber bands on the claw didn't work - the perfect fit of Lego on Lego meant that by thickening up the grabbers even a little meant they only pinched the cubes at one end or the other, like a pinch instead of a grab, and the cubes still wouldn't hold.
Then we put the bands on the cubes, and it worked - not for grip, but for something for the claws to slip under and lift with ease.
I wrote to the organisers and asked about the rubber bands on the cubes. In their response, they said that while they would prefer that that cubes were clean the grip helper was on the robot, if we really really needed to do it this way they supposed it might be okay.
Like I said, technically they sort of begrudgingly cleared it, so it technically kinda sorta wasn't cheating. But... it kinda sorta still felt like cheating.
Plus, without knowing how many judges there were, I couldn't imagine Mike circulating my email to all the judges somehow confirming that "if these guys have rubber bands, I told them it's frowned upon but kind of okay."
So, once we had one successful rubber band run, we called it done... but I couldn't let it go.
Over the next week, Charlie and I took some of the forklift apart, and did some further testing to see if we could find a Lego on Lego solution.
And find it we did! The answer was...TYRES!
Check out this bad boy:
Stev3, look at you, you beefy hunk of rubbery muscle.
Admittedly it didn't work nearly as well as the rubber bands, reason being it required more motor power to keep the grip tight, which resulted in weakening the motors after a few runs. After two or three tests, Stev3 got sloppy and dropped the cubes a lot unless he got frequent breaks.
Charlie popped by the office after school, and together we nailed down Tidy the Toys before dinner.
(We won't post the final run yet, but here's one of our first successful test runs with the tyre grippers.)
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