Monthly Archives: February 2019

Now that Week 6 and the entire build season is over, we have finished our robot and bagged it! We had a lot of work to do this week, but everybody contributed and we managed to accomplish all of the goals we planned out in Week 5. At the beginning of the week, our programmers worked hard to finish up our drive code and vision/alignment systems. Later in the week, we held our driver tryouts in order to choose our driver and operator. We finished the assembly of our robot and were in a bit of a time crunch to tie up a few final loose ends on the very last day, but we powered through and got it done. Our first competition is San Francisco Regional, and we’re hoping for a good performance!

As Week 5 comes to an end, we only have one more week to work on our robot before it’s bagged and tagged. Although all of our mechanisms have been machined or assembled, we still need to attach them to our drivetrain and begin testing all within the next week. For now, we finalized our CAD this week, so we are ready to continue assembly and testing. We also tested our drivetrain in order to make sure it’s running properly, and hope to test our other mechanisms in Week 6 as well. We have quite a bit of work cut out for us, but with our increased efficiency and the longer work hours that inevitably accompany the end of build season, we should be able to pull it off. Be sure to tune in next week for DESTINATION: TESTING AND BAGGING.

We’re currently behind but catching up fast. Even though there’s only a little over two weeks left in build season, we still have about half the number of hours remaining. I guess that’s what happens when our schedule is heavily skewed toward more hours at the end of build season. Going into Week 5, we have a driving robot, which is a big milestone in build season. On the mechanical side, our CADers have been working on our elevator mechanism and the elevator carriage. Instead of the monorail elevator design we used last year, we are making an elevator with two rails parallel to one another–a design that proved successful in 2018. CADers also worked on gearboxes and other integrative components to finish our mechanisms and overall design. Meanwhile, our machinists have worked on brackets, hex hubs, and elevator rails (which they are still working on). Assembly and electrical members have focused on building our chassis from our machined drive rails and constructing our electrical boards. We chose to build two robots this year, and currently our first robot chassis is fully assembled with an electrical board, while our second robot is slightly behind without attached electronics. Having learned from our mistake of using a slanted electrical board last year, [...]