Thursday Waco is only a short trip(less than 2 hours) from out shop in Austin. This allowed us to spend the morning in the shop making last minute adjustments to autonomous and arm control logic. There were two small problems that happened in the above video, they’ll happen again. The robot was loaded on the…

The team leaves tomorrow afternoon for Waco. That means tonight was hectic to say the least. The team was busy packing, fine tuning code, fixing the final remaining problems and finishing documents. We got 18 lbs of ballast added to the back of the robot, it isn’t that pretty but it was quick and it…

The next iteration of intake went on the robot today. There was a clearance issue with the motor and the sweeper plate that had to get fixed by hand but everything else fit together. Below are two gifs, our first time intaking a cube and the first time scoring it into a high node. We…

Its been a busy past few days. The arm movement speed was increased on both joints, its at a good spot right now. But faster is always better? If we get really good at cycling and lining up in the next few days we might try to increase the speed of the arm again. Right…

The gearbox for the arm was reinforced by adding doubling the number of standoffs by the choochoo wheel. This made the gearbox super rigid and it doesn’t flex when the arm extends any more. That’s the short term fix to buy us more testing and driving time until the real fix is manufactured. The real…

On the programming side of things we switched the arm over to a profiled PID controllers. The has made the arm move significantly smoother. We still have to spend more time increasing the speed and tuning PID values. The base joint movement is the slow part of the process right now and eventually we can…

The buddy carry is slowly getting assembled. We’ve been finding a small thing wrong, releasing a fix and finding the next thing to fix. The 40 upgraded metal cam plates all got cut tonight and just need to be de burred. During assembly we found out the 3D printed mount for the gas shock wasn’t…

With the majority of the parts manufactured the team started assembling the arm on the competition robot. The few missing parts were quickly turned out and the arm was completely assembled. We didn’t run into any problems during assembly which is great. After assembly the first thing we did was head over to the scale,…

Our manufacturing sub team has been blazing through the parts to make. They ended the day with 7 unique parts left to make. Two router parts, one mill part, and four lathe parts. Of the lathe parts two of them were missed on the initial release and just got Trello cards created at the end…

Short update today, parts are continuing to be made. Three lathe parts and two router parts were finished yesterday. This leaves 6 router parts, 8 lathe parts and 1 mill part. Assembly started and mostly finished on the arm’s winch gear box today. The only missing piece is the 3D printed spool, we expect to…