STAR WARS 7 IS OUT NOW! Today, we made a better gear chain, using direct instead of indirect connection. We've also decided to use the long-shaft idea (see end of 12/12/2015) and put more gears on the other side for more speed.
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We still have many problems with the robot. One is that the issue of friction still hasn't been solved, and some new feedback shows that our gearing is also quite bad. See, one part of our gearbox involves a gear chain where the biggest gear turns a medium gear, which turns the smallest gear.
Today was just full of problems. The first is that the shaft connecting the two gearboxes together was bent. Another problem is that the gearbox has too much friction. We had tried running it a few times, but it seemed to work less and less. When we asked for some professional help, we learned that we had forgotten a crucial part of the gearbox: washers. Supposed to be: And the ball collector finally gave up on us. When the ball got to a certain point, it just stopped like it got stuck on something. We would have to remake it.
For the gearbox, we decided to use only are gearbox end are wheel and attach it to the other side of the robot with a long shaft. Today, we improved on our wobbly shooter, stabilizing it using a new engineering principle that we learned. It states that for true stability, a structure needs support on three dimensions, not just on one plane. We saw that our shooters were fixed on 2-dimensional planes, so we decided to give it another, like shown in the diagram above.
Today we managed to fix the shooter and stabilized it. We also refined the ball intake system, trying to lessen the chances of it malfunctioning. Also, we took out the ball-shooting ramp for relocation later. Finally we've started to plan our autonomous us period, because it would give us a hung advantage if we have one while either teams do not. Eric and Jeff are currently designing our team logo (we found out we'd need it to mark our expensive property like our cortex, motors, joystick, etc). This is their current idea:
We managed to attach the shooters to our robot today! It looks really cool, and stays within the height limit. It's a
Today we made a copy of our shooter's gearbox (since it only had 3 motors and would need about 6 for enough power), an exact replica to be connected on the same axle. We also came up with an idea for carrying out elevation with only one motor. But because we had used all of our motors even without elevation, we were out of motors. We But because we had used all of our motors even without elevation, we were out of motors. So we decided to base our entire intake system on one motors with everything connected by a chain.
Because we wanted to maximize the height of our robot (to prevent sabotage from taller competitors - see 11/25/2015) He had a few problems here and there with unevenness of the ramp and the proximity of the converter belt to it. The gearbox is working great! We can actually feel wind coming off of it when it spins a wheel! Things are going really well for our team!
We completed our new ball collector to accommodate for the new vertical structure. Ir works like MAGIC!
We decided to refine our gearbox a little, first by making it a little smaller and not require as many materials as a result (this would make it lighter and help other robots elevate it) We also got advice to make the gearbox's range a little smaller, because it might lose strength or go too fast and overshoot. It turns out our robot was not actually going so well. We learned from an 'expert' that horizontal robots could be blocked by ones higher up. So we decided to abandon the idea of the mechanism with the CAM gears and lose the ramps for elevation.
Another change we decided to make was in the gearbox, completely remaking it and making it smaller and more compact than before. It works pretty well, but it rattles a little bit around the gears. We would have to fix it later. |
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April 2016
Categories"Uhhh, Guys?"-Scott "YOU ARE TESTING MY PATIENCE" - Daniel "Guys, get to work"-Tom "What should we do???"-Jeff & Eric "GIMME SOMETHING TO DO!!" -Eric "WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!?"-Daniel "Jefferytheengineer" "CLEAN UP CLEAN UP EVERYBODY CLEAN UP" "OMG. ERIC IS ACTUALLY WORKING"- Everyone |