Today we pushed forward to our goal of having the elevator, intake, and drive base assembled by end of Saturday. The shooter now lives on the kit bot, and had some gears swapped around to bring the fly wheel speed back up. We are waiting on a vex pro order that just got put in for the correct pullies. We are aiming to have a 1:1.5 over drive from the Neo to the 4″ wheel. This will hopefully fix out pathetically under powered shoot we observed the other night.

Our CNC router had a very busy night. There were two groups of people working to keep it cutting all night. One person doing CAM, handing off the prepped code and the other group doing setup for cuts and watching it. The intake polycarb pieces were all cut and the first side was assembled tonight. The intake uses 2″ OD PVC rollers to intake the power cells. During our testing we ran them with no covering and were surprised at how well the griped the power cells. Hopefully we can get away with out a grip material. We will need to get the shafts cut, PVC rollers cut, and a custom hub to power the PVC rollers made before we can test.

The CNC router doesn’t get a break yet, we still have to cut a metal bracket for the intake, and then all of the elevator plates, approximately 4 different plates. The elevator has the second stage being remade, it should be finished for Saturday. The elevator also has some spacers that will need to be made before assembly can begin. The planetary gearboxes for the elevator were cleaned, greased and assembled tonight. There are additional spacers for the shoulder bolt that probably need to be designed in CAD, and I’m sure other bit that we don’t have done yet. We might not hit our goal of having the elevator assembled by end of Saturday.

The shooter is being mounted inside the robot in CAD. It is under going some slight geometry changes, and improvements. There will be a single side being powered and the ball rolling against polycarb wrap with PTFE. The PTFE is hopefully slick enough to prevent power cell jams. We are trying to use dead axles, to power the rollers and accelerator wheel so we can get by with using 1″ x 1″ tubing for the structure.

We are having a big push on Saturday in order to meet our goals. Hopefully the router will be busy cutting a bunch of different parts while the others make parts on the manual mills, and lathes. Assembly will be an ongoing process. I’m hopeful that we can get something that starts to look like a robot by the end of the day.