Sundays are an optional attendance day for our team, because of this we had light attendance. We didn’t let this affect us and set off right to work with the dedicated students and mentors that showed up.

Prototype Intake

The intake prototype we cut yesterday was assembled rather quickly. Its a just two sheets of plywood with two bearing holes and a mounting pattern for a versa planetary gear box. The intake was assembled with a 10:1 reduction powered by a Neo. This ratio was chosen because it was assembled already. During testing we all agreed that the intake speed was too slow and should be gear to double our robots speed in final design. The intake had two sets of wheels and moved the ball against a bumper and into the robot. The intake geometry worked well, but the final intake design be slightly dependent on how we hold the balls within the robot, which we have not figured out yet.

Prototype Hopper

Initial design work was started on how we prototype a hopper today. The challenge is not letting balls get jammed against each other or into a spot that the hopper cant remove them from. Along with that consistently delivering the power cells to the shooter in a timely fashion.

Prototype Shooter

The field build team managed to assemble the power port today. We made great use of this immediately by testing our prototype shooter with the real target. One of the things that stuck out to me was how unlikely our current angle is to go into the inner scoring hole. This isn’t a deal breaker for us as we were never aiming for it. We had some back to back shot consistency issues. After looking at the shooter velocity graph we decided to add some rotating mass to the fly wheel shooter. We added some steel gears alongside the flywheel, this were already hex broached and heavy enough for our testing needs. The Neo had no problem spinning up the additional mass, and the shots were more consistent. One of the problems we have yet to resolve is the stability of our shooter. We are going to attach the legs to piece of plywood at the bottom during our next meeting.

Manufacturing

The manufacturing team got some new part drawings today for the gear box shafts, and discovered we seem to have lost the slotting tool to make the groves for E clips. They also set out to remaking replacement drive rails for the ones that got incorrectly sized bearing holes put into them.

Everybot 2020

So today The Robonauts released the first look at the Every Bot for 2020. Video can be found here. For those unfamiliar with what the Every Bot is its a robot design that Team 118 releases every year that is able to be built by a low resource team with the kit of parts, and an additional $1k of spending, and it is able to play the game at a minimal competitive level. If you are a low resource team or struggling with what to build, build the Every Bot. Its a great start to a competitive robot, if you finish early spend your extra time doing driver practice and show up to your first event with a kick ass robot.

If you aren’t building the Every Bot you can still learn for what they put out. They designed their robot to intake balls, score low goal, and climb. If they are dedicating their limited resource to these tasks, you’d better be dedicating your resources to them too, or have a good reason why you decided not too.