January 23, 2023 - Now in Metal and Electronics

Two main projects tonight

Project 1 - Putting together the cube shooter/intake version 2 "this time in metal". Gettel and Jarrod worked on getting the sprockets for the axles tapped and ready to go. Charlie, William, and Sam mounted the motors and attached the 80/20 extrusion to form the skeleton of it. Lastly the group got it all together with chain so it's ready to rock!

Next main hurdle mechanically is mounting it to the chassis and figuring out a motor/chain/sprocket/axle situation to actually deploy it to pick up cubes and spin it back in to shoot. But we made BIG progress tonight getting it all together. We also want to CAD it up so we can make our actual final pieces. 

Project 2 - Getting the electronics belly pan mounted and electronics all wired up. Andrew, Edward, and Matthew hit a speed bump when the chassis of the robot was a little tippy for some reason so they worked on diagnosing that for a while. But eventually the electronics were mostly hooked back up with two more controllers for the intake/shooter. We'll be ready to drive again and, most importantly, test the shooter/intake tomorrow hopefully. 

Next main hurdle is actually mounting all the electronics down and finding a spot for the battery. We're leaning toward no pneumatics at this point (nothing will require it so far) but we'll see.




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

February 11, 2023 - Rebuilding for the last (haha) time

Image
Last Saturday before Eagan! Wooo!!  Sam, Jayden, and I worked on rebuilding the intake/shooter for hopefully one of the last times. We used the new plates and it all came together wonderfully. It took a while because we had to assemble the new gearbox and hex hubs and stuff. So yeah, new shooter/intake is all ready. Our other big task was making the "hard stops" for the mechanism to be brought in and put out with a controller so we got that done as well. Matthew and Gettel worked on getting the front bumper all set. I didn't record a video because we only practiced shooting once or twice but, for the most part, the mechanical aspects of the robot are all ready to go for now. Yay! Andrew H and Matthew did a great job on electrical today. They installed the encoders that they could which included a lot of tedious soldering. They also installed the operating light on a bracket so we're all good there too. There's still some wire management to do among other things bu...
Read more

January 16, 2023 - Driving Base Robot and Prototyping

Image
 With everyone off work/school we met at the shop from 12pm to 5pm. Edward and Coach Sticht focused on programming the robot. The radio was being finicky so we didn't get to wireless driving just yet but we will soon. The robot DID drive and balanced on the charging station. YAY!!! That was the most exciting moment of the day. The rest of the group focused on moving stuff out of the back back room and prototyping. The prototyping went fairly well. We have a few general ideas for intakes and outputs. A milk carton was cut up as a basket. Jarrod and Mohamud did some math for us to figure out pivot points and arm lengths for a mid cone score. We're still working though lots of ideas but that's what this week is for!
Read more

January 28, 2023 - New Brackets, Website Updates, and a Booster Club

Image
We were hanging out doing stuff when I looked at the calendar and realized we only have 2 more Saturday meetings until our first Week Zero. WOAH! That shouldn't make any of us anxious but it definitely is wild just how fast time passes and how little time we really have until the scrimmages.  Build team did a few big things today. Sam and Jarrod worked on making our new and improved brackets for the intake/shooter. I gotta say, watching Jarrod be a wizard with CAD was pretty freaking sweet (s/o Solidworks). Also, Sam killed it making the steel brackets. They look so good. Build Team also moved the CIM motors around a few different times to try to offset the cube compression that was happening. The cube compression is causing the shooter action to not work reliably. We have a more ideas to try, not time to freak out. We are definitely on the right track (it works great when everything is lined up). We just need to keep iterating and trying to get that consistency. But we're conf...
Read more