Today, we completed our wheel-based gearbox. It was really strong, and really fast. We did not concentrate on our elastic shooter this time. In fact, we're considering abandoning the idea and just sticking with the wheel-base shooter. To make elevation possible for our robot, we came up with a mechanism that would let us do this and shoot at the same time. Mechanism: 2. Shooting mode We will work on securing the gearbox and adding the CAM gear later.
The last thing we did was add rubber pads to our ramps on the sides to assist other robots in moving up them(more friction would lessen the chances of the wheels slipping). Our robot's going GREAT! :)
0 Comments
Today, we attached a ramp to our base meaning we can now elevate other robots to get 25 points! :D The shooter is going pretty well, but there are a few engineering issues like motor count, the required amount of strength required to stretch the rubber bands for back enough and space. We also attacked rubber pads to our ramp to provide extra friction and make it easier for other robots to go up easier. It now looks like a tank! However, because our shooter is having a lot of issues we might do a wheel-based shooter at the same time as a plan B. We'll come tomorrow to keep working on our robot, completing the base and hopefully getting a new ball collector for our robot's new horizontal structure.
Today I noticed that the base was a little wobbly, and strengthened it with standoffs. But while Daniel was playing around with our shooter, he noticed a major engineering problem where the nautilus gear(picture is under) would get in the way of the ball's path So we decided to make TWO nautilus gears on both sides of the shooter.
Today we attached a ramp for our ball collector, and changed the wheels a little to work better with the balls(they didn't catch them very well). We also fixed a motor and printed our a cam gear for our shooter. We should be done soon! :)
Today, we attached a ball collector to the base using omniwheels(then the balls would be able to come in from more directions). We also refined the shooter so that the paddle could slide better. What I noticed from playing with our shooter was that the rubber bands weakened quickly. We would need a lot of them during a game.
This week we came up with a new concept for a robot, one that used elastic bands like the one used by the winning team during the skirmish. Their shooter was able to consistently score well in the high goals, meaning we could do that too if we manage to pull it off. That's because it was using cam gears, gears that are shaped like the Fibonacci spiral. Here is a rough sketch of our shooter: We have already completed a new base. Daniel had thought of a new concept, and we've also decided to use haptic wheels. It's going great!
Our shooter's going well, too. It can already shoot a ball about 1 meter! Today was amazing. Last night, we had to stay up until 2 in the morning to keep working on our robot, and only got 3 hours of sleep! But we still got it done, and it worked surprisingly well, for a low-scoring robot. Though the other robots looked super-complicated and looked formidable, we actually weren't that far behind. In fact, one time we even got to 3RD PLACE in rank! It was the best feeling I ever had. However, our robot started to break down after that for some mysterious reason. First, our right wheels stopped moving at random times during a game. This made for very tight situations where all our robot could do was pivot, while the opposing team was scoring like mad. Then one time we even lost complete connection to our cortex. We had to restart the controller to regain connection. We should get that fixed for next time.
In the end, we were at 9th place. It was a little disappointing after our rise to 3rd, but it was amazing considering the quality of our robot. Overall. I think we had a really good day. Our robot worked well, and we did pretty well. Now all we have to do is refine our robot, fix some minor bugs and come up with a shooting system for it. We had an awesome time today! (Guys, post your thoughts/feelings about the competition here by commenting on this post. Then people would know that they are all related.) We had an EXTRA long session for building today, so we got a lot of things done. Our ball-collector was fine, and we are working on a better shooting system. We made a lot of progress today, and there's only a few more things we have to do until we are done. Next time, we will add our shooter to the robot and begin testing.
We are planning to go with Design A(see entry #2). So we took apart all of our robot except for the gearbox, the rack-and-pinion gears, and the base. Design A only requires a slight rearrangement of these parts, so it would not take very long. We have also worked on refining the rack-and-pinion gears and building a new shooting mechanism like in Design A.
We are still planning to work on elevation, and considering claws on the end of the RAP(rack-and-pinion) gears that could grab another robot's rail and raise it up. We had an extra-long class period for building today. After testing out the shooting system we finished, we decided that it needed more refinement. But when we tried it after that, it still didn't work! We need to rething it. But we did complete the conveyor belt, which is good.
Update: We just received feedback from someone else that our design is probably not going to work due to a few problems in stability and the rack-and-pinion gears. So we've decided to change our design to something else that has a better chance of working. |
Archives
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 |