CAD

Today was a productive day. Work started on bumper mounting, and brain pan placement. A brain pan is where you have the belly pan of the robot on top of the 2×1 frame rails and the space underneath becomes where you put all of your electronics. Prototyping continued today, the intake prototype moved under its own power and we took a few more practice shots with the shooter prototype.

As you can see in the above gif the compliant wheels might be just a tad bit too squishy. The cargo bounce in and out between the rollers before finally catching. We changed out the rollers to blue compliant wheels and will test again on Saturday. There is a small dead spot in the intake that we will iterate on to remove. Also a fun note, when using west cost products belt calculator the default pitch is 3mm not 5mm. All of our center to center calculations for the prototype where wrong.

The slow motion video was taken using my phone a pixel 3a, most phones these days can do slow motion and its a giant help when analyzing prototype performance.

During out prototyping we decided to try and use Rev Robotics hardware client to drive the motors. This was a some what painful process. There are few error messages and sometimes the client will just die and you won’t be able to run any motors. We probably spent 40 minutes trying to get it drive two motors. We lost an embarrassing amount of time because the battery voltage was too low to turn any motors…

Manufacturing

Manufacturing got the files to make the gear box plates. The plates need blanks made on the router first, which is currently tied up producing parts for the behemoth that is the hub. Students began cutting all of the pieces to build the hub today. The kit bot crew continued work on the kit bot. A few students disassembled some husks of old robots that have cluttered our shop for too long.

The manufacturing students have had it some what easy this week, only light field build tasks. They better enjoy the calm as we are just about to release the drive base, and full gearbox for manufacturing. That should keep them busy until CAD pushes our the next subsystem. Probably the intake? Due to some unfortunate decisions we are hosting a vex competition on Saturday so we will be losing the majority of our students for most of the time on Saturday.