Assembly of the robot continued today. We noticed that our E clips kept falling off on the drive base, it turns out the distance between the groves was incorrect, there was too little room for the E clip to fit securely in the grove. The decision was made to drill and tap each shaft and use a washer + bolt to retain the shaft. One problem down, many to go.

The robot got some much needed details figured out, a battery mounting solution was added to the robot, the main breaker, radio and compressor were all mounted to the robot. We spent some time chasing down the bugs we were seeing with hopper subsystem not wanting to drive correctly. There were a few lose connections and a issue in the code. Once these were ironed out we tested the intake and hopper together as a unit for the first time. It works pretty good, no power cells get stuck in the intake. Its hard to tell at the moment if any balls will get stuck on the transition from hopper to conveyor because they conveyor isn’t assembled yet.

We have a few tweaks that we need to add to the hopper and intake, the hopper needs some polycarb backing(you can see we loose a ball in the gif), and possible a polycarb lid. If we found a way to use a smaller PVC roller instead of the compliant wheels we are currently using, it would look cleaner. Due to an order mess up we are waiting on the correct pullies to test the 3rd iteration of the hopper. Those parts should be in by Tuesday.

The shooter and conveyor sub systems were finalized for version one today. It took approximately eight weeks but we finally have our goal of having a CAD complete robot. The shooter is a two position hooded shooter, taking inspiration in part from Mechanical Advantage’s hooded shooter. We have room for ~2 power cells inside the conveyor with the rest sitting inside the hopper, only testing will tell us how well this transition works.