Day 20 & 21: Field and Robot Construction

Robot

We are focusing heavily on manufacturing to make sure all the parts for the robot are ready; we sent several parts to anodize this morning. We also  have a shooter and intake assembled and hope to finish the feeder chute assembled in the next two days.

Field

Today we worked on further field development. We have gotten to  a point in which we are waiting for material resources to proceed. We accounted for field development mistakes, and finished the boilers. In addition, the top pieces of the  airships were mismeasured, and must be recut and rewelded. We also focused on the feeder stations for the gears and balls. We laser cut the majority of the parts and manually cut the rest of them on the chop saw/bandsaw, and then assembled 6 feeder stations to make a full field. 2 are completely done, and the other 4 are all missing one piece before they are also done. We hope to finish the field by Monday night.

CAD

We have completed the CADs for the Bumper, Intake, Shooter, Superstructure, and Drive base – all of which have begun manufacturing/assembly or will be soon. The Intake is a two-roller assembly powered by two 775 Pros in a 3-1 gear ratio with a polycarbonate ramp to assist the ball path as it enters the robot. The Shooter is two 4” Fairlane Single Wheel Backspin shooters side-by-side powered by 4 775 pros. This will also power the Velcro-winch hanging system at the end of the match.

We made lots of progress on the Hopper Container and Conveyor and will hopefully be able to begin manufacturing soon. For the hopper container, the width-expansion constraint geometry needs to be finalized and the bend radius on the actual break needs to be accounted for in the bend radii on our “sheet metal” plastic parts. The conveyor at this point in time is complete, we are currently finishing up the detailing of screws and etc. This is waiting mentor approval before manufacturing. The Feeder and Chute are done for the most part, they only need to be confirmed against the final geometry of the conveyor floor which was finished today. Progress was made on the climber subsystem today, as well.

We worked on a flange for the Velcro drum/roller to displace the touch sensor on the davit with a 3-part rotating flange that stows within the frame perimeter and deploys like a fan with surgical tubing to a circular flange encompassing the roller and providing enough distance between the OD of the flange and the OD of the roller (with Velcro bundled) to displace the touchpad approximately .5” – 1.5”. Moving forward, we want to begin manufacturing on as many things as possible, while fine tuning and checking for interference in CAD. A semi-detailed list of next steps in linked above.