Today, a few students, before the meeting started swapped around the intake rollers, they put the stiffer wheels on the back bar. They also took this opportunity to flip the bearings and add more wheels. We are trying to eliminate a dead zone between one of our vertical rollers and the side of the intake. We saw this dead zone with the MDF bot but managed to eliminate it with more wheels it that spot. It didn’t work for us on the real robot. It might be the lower speed the vertical wheels are running, on the MDF bot it was a Neo with a belt reduction, we now have a 20:1 ultra planetary with a Neo 550, so significantly slower.

The CAD team went on strike today and decided to finish our bumpers up. I suppose that’s fine. The bumpers need to get done, and while we have CAD work to do they might need a small break. On Saturday we are going to look at 125’s climb more in depth and see if we can adapt it to our robot. We have 30 lbs to spare and the entire back of our robot.

The robot was programmings for the entire meeting. They worked on fixing the automatic moving of cargo throughout the CDS. They didn’t get it working yet, will look more at the problem on Saturday. Another chunk of time was spent testing the shooter and getting a MVP stable test branch setup for driver practice. It has manual CDS control and one shooting position but it is still great for practice. We noticed some issues with cargo shot repeatability that we will spend some time on Saturday to fix.

Manufacturing was busy starting on all of the standoffs and shafts that the second robot needs. The brain pan poly carbonate panels were cut out and wiring of the control system can begin on Saturday. Another CAD student was working on assembly of the structure to support the CDS and intake. We noticed the drive rails were out of square and assembled too wide. Oops, both problems were fixed and assembly continued.

Saturday will be filled with more manufacturing, robot testing, programming and some more robot testing. We are trying to get the second robot up and running in under 2 weeks, so that will be a challenge.