We started the meeting with a quick discussion about anything new that we’ve learned since kick off weekend. There was some discussion on scoring analysis, but so far we don’t think we’ve learned any information that would change our strategy.

Double climbing is still hard. Up until today our best idea for a double climb was attaching a pole on our alliance partner’s robot, latching onto that and bringing them up with us. This strategy has several drawbacks: you would have to convince multiple teams to put a hook point on their robot, and you have to help them do it( but not make the piece for them as that would end up breaking the cheese caking rule). Today we talked about another idea, using the area inside of our bumper to provide a platform that a team can drive on and we lift them up the inch or so required to be hanging. To provide a platform, we would lower something from our belly pan once our robot was attached to the generator switch and in the air. The other team would then drive on the platform we’ve lowered and then we raise the platform up.

This idea has a lot of moving parts, and will end up being complex on the robot. But if we manage to pull it off it will be a game changer. The possibility of earning a solo RP and 65 points is too tempting.

Prototyping

Today we tested the prototype fly wheel shooter up against the power port. After tweaking the exit angle of the ball, we started hitting our shots. We managed to make 8/8 shots back to back. Our extra power cells arrive on Thursday so we can’t test rapid fire yet.

We have a list of improvements that we are going to make to our fly wheel shooter before tomorrows meeting.

• Change out the worn bane bots wheels to a single 4″ x 2″ colson wheel
• Recut the fly wheel shooter sides, to maintain the same compression with smaller wheel
• Adding another plywood piece that goes in between the two side to provide support to the polycarb to prevent flexing.

Right now it looks like the fly wheel shooter will get one or two more wood prototypes before we move onto making it out of metal. I am curious to see how accurate we can make the wood version before we start hitting limits of our construction material. Eventually the fly wheel shooter will have an articulated hood with two shooting positions, touching the power port and shooting from the trench. We are also planning on changing out the motor that powers it to a Neo to remove a planetary gearbox from the equation.

Work started today on the improved prototype of the overhead roller intake. We also started to look at how to carry five power cells within the robot.

Programming

Our programming team drew out a diagram of the subsystems that might appear on the final robot. We talked about the goals for programming, and tasks that need to be done. We hope to use a limelight for vision, automatically aligning to the power port target from the trench. One of the goals I set for the programming team is to push for simplification of operator control and intelligent automation, with the goal of reducing the amount of thinking the driver, and operator have to do. Ideally complex actions will be single button presses. The programming team is also working on a way to test each subsystem to ensure that everything is in working order before each match.

Tomorrow we will have a strategic design review and create our robot priority list.