Canned Thoughts

Manufacturing At the end of the day on Saturday there were 72 different parts released to manufacturing to make. We had an optional meeting Sunday, before the start of today’s meeting we had already completed 32 of the parts. A large portion of the completed parts were 3D printed, laser cut, or router parts. Currently

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Today was an optional meeting. So we did the most productive thing we could think of. We put LEDs on the charge station! We put one strip on each side. Great use of time. Next we decided to double check the angles of the charge station in all of its positions. We are within half

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Charge Station It is finally done! Phew, that was a lot of work. It took double my initial estimated number of weeks. We learned a ton of stuff along the way and got to put our new fiber laser to use. It was our team’s first big project made out of bent metal. The charge

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Charge Station It was a busy night tonight, we got the missing pieces cut on the laser. After the pieces were cut they were all bent on the sheet metal brake. Next we got the charge station pieces welded together by the end of the night. Assembly is looking good for Saturday. CAD The buddy

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Prototype Arm The arm is still under geared for the current load even with two motors. The lower joint gear box is going to get reworked to add another reduction. We also noticed the belt might be skipping so we will probably up to a 15 mm wide belt. The intake(weight) at the end of

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Prototype Arm During testing today it was discovered the “choochoo” mechanism is under powered. It had mounting pattern for another motor so we added that, we’ll test it again tomorrow. We probably will have to rework that gearbox to increase the reduction. But we did manage to test the “choochoo” mechanism by hold up the

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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

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Its been a week since we’ve last posted, Austin and a large portion of Texas was coated in layer of ice and we lost all of our weekday meetings because school was cancelled. But we got to meet today, and it feels great to be back at robotics! Prototype Arm Last week we broke the

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Intake prototype team wrapped up with a final few tests today. We wanted to see if we could use spacers on the dual over head rollers to reduce the quantity of compliant wheels. Turns out you can use 1/4″ spacers between each wheel. Attempting to use 1/2″ spacers didn’t work, the cone would get stuck

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Today we tested the 2″ compliant wheels in the dual overhead roller. The durometer of the wheels didn’t seem to make much of a difference. The left side has 60A compliant wheels while the right side is a variety of softer ones. This intake worked well enough that we’ll be making the first refined version

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