Its the Tuesday after week six, historically its bag day! We are not necessarily at the point I’d like the team be at. If we had to bag the robot we’d have a intake version(non working), a untested climber, and a hopper. We would definitely be able to improve the intake, add a hook and shooter by working with our with holding allowance and un-bag time before our first event.

Today the Intake was iterated on. The spacing of the first, and second rollers changed to bring more contact with power cells. The Hopper also got an iteration, to fix the interference of planetary gear boxes hitting the electronics panel. The planetary now will reside in-between the two rollers. We’ve actually made the next revision of the hopper already, we are going to attempt to power it with a baby Neo(550) and a rev ultra planetary gearbox. We are waiting for the ultra planetary gear boxes to arrive still.

The revisions of intake and hopper all got cut out on the CNC router during the meeting. The hopper was assembled, we got the center to center distance for the belts wrong for the first revision still powered by the planetary gearbox. The belt is a little tight at the moment. The intake was not reassembled because some belts we thought were ordered on Saturday didn’t get ordered. Thankfully we are about four hours from both Vex and Rev Robotics so it only takes two days to get most things we order. Much to the amazement of some of our new mentors from Hawaii who are used to shipping times of weeks.

One thing the team has improved on this year is iteration. In the off season we stressed the importance of iterating and testing, and making minor improvements along the way, always aiming to be better. We are rapidly iterating on the hopper, and intake, that last iteration had a turn around of one meeting.

The electronics panel got attached with Velcro inside the robot. The elevator got its finishing touches of assembly today. Spacers were added to the output shaft were the sprockets attach to the final gear reduction. A temporary main breaker was wired in to the robot, and we struggled trying to get Roborio to update firmware. We were getting an error, but it was resolved by rebooting the Roborio into safe mode. The goal was to test the elevator under load, but we ran out of time whilst troubleshooting the Roborio. Programming has some errors to debug and we might have a fault in the CANbus? We will figure out tomorrow.