Today was a day filled with assembly. For the first time this year the bottleneck isn’t waiting for CAD. Instead we are now slogging through assembly of three subsystems at once. The elevator, intake, and hopper are all being assembled.

The elevator assembly is the most difficult part, there are spacers that align the sprockets inside the tube, and those are hard to put together. The elevator also has to have the stages assembled together, you can’t slide an assembled stage in. For the second iteration of the elevator we will fix a few spots where its really hard to slide a spacer in. We bolted the chain to the final stage of the elevator with 3 #4-40 bolts, cue two students attempting to break the bolts by holding the elevator stage and pulling on the chain. They were not successful. Tomorrow we’ll be putting the chain on the elevator and if all goes well, we might be able to do our first test of it.

The shooter and conveyor are progressing in CAD. We have to test some more angles because we have slightly changed the height at which we are shooting, and we want to make sure that we can still hit the goal. During the meeting we didn’t think we could do the shooter hood in one extension and that we would need to use a cascading hood in order to go from 30 degrees to 60 degrees. However thinking as I write this blog, it should be possible. Just increase the 30 degree arc and hide any excess on the bottom.

The robot is starting to come together, bumpers are being made. The CNC router made all of the parts we released yesterday, progress is coming. Hopefully we’ll be able to start testing the sub systems soon.