We started the week by assembling the final subsystems of our robot. We mounted and calibrated the elevator, worked on bumpers, began manufacturing parts for our intake and indexer, and mounted the outtake onto the elevator. Meanwhile, our Software team created code for each subsystem to streamline the final weeks of integration testing before our week 1 competition.
On Wednesday, we began assembling the deep cage climb mechanism. Our manufacturing team quickly made the necessary parts, allowing the assembly to proceed smoothly. Our Software team also continued refining our intake and indexer code, and our Control Systems team attached the energy chain to our elevator.
On Saturday, our hardware team calculated that our robot would be overweight. They immediately brainstormed creative ways to reduce the weight. They decided to switch the Drivetrain rails from 1/8 to 1/16 inch, the Battery belly pan from 1/4 to 1/8 inch with an additional weight reduction grid pattern; the polycarb cover for the control system board was also reduced from 1/8 to 1/16 inch. Manufacturing for these changes began immediately. The upside is the team would now have a beta bot that will be used to test and finetune near-final subsystems, and auto routines, and allow our driver to continue to practice on our practice field while our weight-reduced competition robot drive train is assembled and tested in parallel.
Over the rest of the weekend, we finished assembling the intake mechanism and began testing the beta bot with the outtake on the elevator. Our Software team also continued working on our auto routines and vision integration.
We plan to continue testing on our alpha & beta bots. The plan is to finish assembling and integrating all subsystems next week on the comp bot, complete calibration, testing, and to validate that the robot functional requirements that the team set during week 1 are satisfied.
Additionally, we had team 604 and team 2473 visit our practice field to test their robots, giving us a glimpse into their build season progress.
See you all for next week’s blog, a special edition as our high school is going on February Break, but that doesn’t mean the grind stops! Robotics will be running at full force!
