The robot continued to get upgrades today. The main breaker polycarb backing was upgraded to include additional mounting spots for the pressure gauges and regulator. The electronics board got some minor reworking with a dremel tool to make room to run some cables and make getting at some power poles easier.

The big news of the day came with the hook and elevator. The cnc router cut a new backing for the elevator that reduced the profile of the back side of the elevator, allowing it to clear the battery. The next piece the router cut was the final parts needed for the hook, the actual hooks! We wasted no time before we got the hooks assembled and rigged up with some pneumatic tubing for the spring deploy. After we got the hook assembled some one asked why don’t we carry it over and test it to see how the hook slides around? I countered with asking why don’t we try the full climb?

The first test worked too, but the robot didn’t go up as far and I’m too lazy to make two gifs showing essentially the same thing. So pretend that is the first climb. Cool. We didn’t remember to test if the two Neo’s would back drive when disabled or not, but I think it will be fine once we set them to brake mode.

After testing the climber we weighed the robot on the scale. The last time we weighed ourselves we were sitting at ~45 lbs(just a drive base). We’ve added a bunch of different sub systems and electronics since then, probably waited a bit too long to weigh ourselves again. We are currently sitting at 108 lbs with out the shooter or conveyor subsystems. That number is a bit high.. We quickly identified areas were could drop quick weight. The belly pan can be pocketed, the bottom plates of the elevator are 1/4″ aluminium plate and could be pocketed. With these three plates we think we could lower our weight by ~10lbs.

Its less than two weeks to our first competition and now we can cross off the first scoring action on our priority list! We can now climb with our robot. The climber is looking sweet, there are a few final details to work out but the core is solid. So where does that leave us?

1. Drive
   1. Reliability, Never Die on Field, Move in Auto, Fast
2. Single climb
   1. If solo climbing level
3. Robot height < 28″
4. Floor intake (touch it, own it)
5. Holding 5 power cells
6. Score outer goal from scoring zone (quickly)
7. Consistent indexing and possession of power cells within the robot.
8. Score from trench with >95% accuracy
9. Level Buddy Climb
10. Intake from loading station
11. Low scoring
12. Control panel manipulation

We are currently up to number six, number two and three where proven today. The others yesterday and some last week. So ~10 days to manufacture, assemble, and test a hooded shooter that should be able to score from the outer zone and trench. Totally doable. In fact we might even be able to make some more improvements before Del Rio. Looking back at the list I realize that programming has been excluded from consideration in this, but it would be wise to add in autonomous. Some items such as scoring with 95% accuracy most likely require programming, so they have not been completely forgotten.