Manufacturing

Manufacturing was in full swing today. Our students were busy making the 8 drive rails for two robots. Students were also working on the shafts required for the drive base.

Another student managed to make four of the required gear box plates we need. There was a lot of learning going on while making the plates and a few had to be scrapped but we have progress!

The hub rose to the shop ceiling today, its still missing the interior polycarb but we have that complete and should be able to install it all tomorrow. At least it was easier to assemble the Hub than the team build version of the generator switch for 2020… Nightmares..

The students working on the kit bot are almost finished, they have all of the belts on the drive base. The outer drive rail was also attached. I think they just have to bolt the wheels into place, add a battery holder and figure out some electronics.

CAD

Busy busy busy, CAD is hammering away at the wood version of the robot. The shooter and CDS wooden prototypes were created in CAD today. The shooter has a manually adjusted hood, it’ll be fun to break out the protractor to measure our hood angle. I should probably find a better way to measure angles. The CDS is using timing belts to move the cargo up to the shooter wheel. Right before the shooter wheel is a final wheel that is used to stop the cargo from moving into the shooter until we are ready.

The intake and half of the CDS was assembled today. Its slightly painful to squish the compliant wheels onto the shaft and it wasn’t that much fun doing it 24 times. It was a bit of a struggle to tension all three belts on the one shaft, maybe next time we will limit it to two belts a shaft. We didn’t get any time to test the intake and .5 CDS yet, a job for tomorrow!

Random Idea

So I was doing inventory of gears today, and I got really tired of counting gear teeth. It wouldn’t be that hard to create a simple application that uses a photo of the gear and counts the number of teeth on the gear. Its a super niche application but would have saved me minutes counting teeth today….