Monthly Archives: February 2020

While we did not meet as often as we wish we could, students got together over our February break for a few days and got as much done as possible! Thus, here is our brief blog post.  Our mechanical team has been working very hard to put together the rest of our mechanisms. Our intake, indexer, and shooter have now been successfully mounted. Our climb is assembled but we plan to test it on one of our older robots before attaching it to our current one. Our programmers have started rigorous work on our code and we hope to do more work on the sensors we plan to mount. That being said, we have a few finishing touches to do on our electrical board. Our entire superstructure is able to be flipped up, giving our team easy access to the bellypan where all of our components are. That being said, we have begun connecting the motors on our superstructure to our electrical board below. Since the wires must be longer to compensate for the flip up, we are held up because we have run out of wires.  Nevertheless, we are excited to hand over a complete robot to our programmers soon, as we intend to finish by March 6. We wish everyone else a productive eighth week! [...]

Continuing our blog post from last week, we have more to say on the programming aspect of our team. Separate from the robot itself, some members have worked on Autodesk Synthesis in hopes of simulating our robot on a CAD model of the field without having our physical robot up and running. While they were able to generate the field, Synthesis proved to be difficult to work with and we hope to make more advancements soon. Additionally, we have begun work on our scouting app for this season and it will be similar to the one we used last year. In regards to the robot itself, our programmers have tested our color sensor on our rotating indexer (see previous blog posts for more details on this mechanism). The sensor was able to detect yellow and blue through the polycarb used on the mechanism and could determine if each spot was empty or contained a ball. Students were also able to view how many balls were stored and the data could be viewed on a shuffleboard. Our mechanical teams made progress as well. Machining is complete! This was also thanks to the machinists who did the CAM for all of our CNC parts and the students who worked on our shopbot. Now, all of our parts are organized and have [...]

Since last week, prototyping has been finalized along with the CAD of our superstructures. We are now moving onto finalizing as much of the entire robot CAD as we can. We had issues involving the general packaging of all of our components, but a few tweaks to some positioning has solved these conflicts. Since the CAD process is pretty much complete, our CAD team has continued making part drawings for our manual machinists to make using either a mill or a lathe. To maximize our efficiency and hone in on the most crucial parts to machine, we created a parts-to-machine list that sorts all of our manual parts by subsystem. We also kept to our organization system, ensuring no duplicate or lost parts. On top of our leaps in machining progress, we are excited to begin some of our assembly! While we have not finished the parts on our parts-to-machine list, we have given as much as we could to our assembly team in hopes that we will be able to test mechanisms separate from the entire robot.  Our programmers have done a lot of work this week as well. We have tested our shooter and worked on adjusting motors and speeds. In regards to autonomous, we have compiled a list of tasks we hope to do during [...]

To begin, our primary focus during the week was our CAD finalization and tuning of our drivetrain. We considered our overall packaging and how each of our mechanisms would fit together. We had to account for the amount of space we had available on our drivetrain, while keeping the accessibility of the electrical board in mind. We settled on a large billet to attach all of our mechanisms to, which would be capable of flipping out in order to service electrical components.  From there, we had to decide how we wanted to climb and where it would be on the robot. We designed a telescoping arm with two strings in order to hook our robot onto the bar and lift ourselves with a winch. We tried to limit how much space it took on the robot to account for the size of our indexer and intake.  We finished up the drivetrain assembly, checked our electrical board, and then finished installing pneumatic components. Afterwards, some of our mechanical team and programming team began drivetrain testing. We discovered an issue with spacing in our gearboxes, but it was soon resolved and testing continued.  As we begin week four, we hope to begin machining the parts for our final mechanisms and begin assembly on the superstructures of our robot. [...]