So we are behind schedule, probably were behind before the ice storm but are certainly far behind now. Its 18 days until week one competitions start. That means it is that time of the year for Sunday meetings again.

This past Sunday’s meeting was focused around testing and debugging the code for the arm. By the end of the day we are able to command an angle to the outer joint of the arm. Next steps are being able to command an angle to the bottom joint. Once we are able to set the angle of both joints we can move onto testing the inverse kinematics. After that comes the hard task of making the system smooth and controllable.

Overall Progress

The robot has four distinct sub systems, drive, intake, arm and buddy carry. The drive base is 100% complete, along with all of the wiring. We have a “borrowed” everybot intake currently, but are working on our own from our prototyping lessons, CAD is about 40% of the way done on our refined version.

The arm prototype has been assembled and turned over to programming. The outer joint is working, but we need to test the “choochoo” / crank rocker mechanism still. The refined CAD of the arm has been started and is moving along quickly, lets say 70% complete. That brings us to our final subsystem the buddy carry. The buddy carry is the furthest along sub system, CAD is doing the first design review on Tuesday. If all goes well we will hopefully be able to release the parts to manufacturing on Wednesday.

With one subsystem complete and two more close it is going to be a busy two weeks but I think we can get everything done in time for our first event. If things progress quickly and we don’t hit any major snags we should be able to get a decent amount of practice with our robot.