At the start of the meeting I took a little bit of time to clean up the mess of wires that the top four motors resulted in. It didn’t take long but I was able to make it look so much nicer. Then we added the lime light and wired it up. Next was a big step for the robot, it moved!

Today was an important milestone for the robot, it drove around, used its intake to collect a cargo, drove to the hub and shot the cargo into the goal. It didn’t do some of these things very well. We have a lot of work to do to improve it! There is a lot of scrub when turning the robot in place. So in place turning is poor. Some of it might be over aggressive current limiting on the drive Neos(currently set to 40amps).

The intake can intake the cargo quite well, but its currently possible for a cargo to get stuck in between the vertical rollers and the intake. We saw this one the MDF bot and just moved the wheels into different spots to prevent it. So we will give that a try tomorrow. The black wheels we have on the real robot have varying levels of durometer, some are quiet squishy and others really stiff. So we will be tweaking the arrangement and the squishyness of the rollers.

The intake top piece of poly carbonate can fall off the lower piece of poly carbonate and the geometry changes. We aren’t sure if that is too big of a problem yet. The intake also has a shaft lock eating at the poly carbonate. The bearing needs to be flipped. Flipping the bearing might also solve the problem of the plates falling between each other.

The CDS seems to be working okay besides the stopper wheel being a little under powered. We might increase the reduction or put a Neo in its place. The shooter was doing fine after a few tweaks to the velocity set point.

The robot on a whole just needs a bit of time to tweak it to make it perform better. We have 21 days to make those tweaks so we are in an okay spot. We are going to release the CDS and shooter poly carbonate plates tomorrow and the rest of the parts for the CDS. Hopefully we can get the second robot up and running in less than two weeks. The variable hood was released to manufacturing today. I have the wishbone gears printing on my 3D printer right now. The robot for the next few days will be mostly reserved for programming so they can get everything into a nice working state.