As February comes to an end, students have been hard at work during their break. We are putting the finishing touches on our robot, and are preparing for our first competition in the upcoming week.
This week, the elevator, 4-bar arm, and intake have been mounted onto our robot. This has allowed our electrical team to wire around the superstructure. The wires for the encoders have been mounted on the side of the elevator, and we braided the wires for the sparkmax and NEOs motors to prevent them from becoming tangled. The team has taken careful consideration to ensure that the wiring is as organized as possible. We also wired an e-chain cable carrier, which allows the elevator to extend to the maximum height. The electrical team is using mesh cable shrouds to protect the motor cables for the elevator, to the virtual 4-Bar, and intake/outtake.
As our first competition approaches in the upcoming week, our team is working many hours to ensure that our robot is ready.
The robot is very close to being finished, and we only have to mount the extending arm to complete the superstructure. The electrical team finished all of the wiring and they are working on organizing the wires to end at one point, creating an efficient modular design. The machining team has also finished manufacturing all of the parts we need, and both mechanical subteams are currently working on creating spares for the robot.
With the main bulk of the robot finished, the programming team is busy testing their code on the robot and its subsystems. We tested the ground intake, cube outtake, and cone outtake in the community room. The community room gives us a great opportunity for our drive team to receive a lot of practice with the robot. We are experiencing a problem with the backlash of the extending arm, which the mechanical and programming team are working to fix. Programmers are also working on autonomous and a new path planner to integrate into the system. The scouting team is finished with the new app, and they started training members on how to use it for the upcoming competitions. Other members are working on packing the pit and preparing for our first competition.
After many productive weeks, our determined members have put in a lot of effort to create the robot our team has envisioned. We are looking forward to competing at Hueneme Port Regionals this week, and wish the best of luck to all teams!
Check out our Charged Up robot here. The programmers are still fine tuning our robot game piece handling on our practicefield. You can check out some videos here, here, and here.
Joshua Matthews is the electrical lead and he is a fourth year on the team. He joined robotics because he likes engineering and theoretical knowledge. He enjoys the hands-on experience aspect of robotics, as well as the idea of engineering and designing something. His most memorable moment from robotics was going to Hueneme Port Regionals because it was his first competition last year, and he learned a lot through his experience. When asked to describe robotics in three words, his response was, “Design, organization, and teamwork.”