Day #24: Bumpers, Wiring, and Continued Prototyping

CAD

Students made some of the drawings for the conveyor shafts. The shafts with finished drawings should be finished tonight.

Manufacturing

Students manufactured a few of the shafts for the conveyor assembly. These hex shafts will used with the polyurethane rollers to move the frisbees from the intake to the piston-powered loader.

Manufactuing parts on the lathe

Bumpers

Students began measuring the dimensions of the bumper cordura based on the measurements of the robot bumper assembly in Solidworks. They will order 4 yd x 60 in cordura material from Seattle Fabrics for the red and blue bumpers. Particular effort will be spent making sure that the colors are according to the team standards. After confirmation of all details, they will place the order.

Wiring

Wiring today consisted of soldering connectors onto a mini CIM motor and another set of connnectors for the speed controller to test out the intake prototype.  The students discovered that the motor’s shaft was spinning, while the gear was not.  After some modificaitons, the team was able to successfully control the speed of the intake with the speed controller, which was mapped to the Logitech gamepad.

The current drivebase chassis

Prototyping

Students continued design on the intake, revising the polyurethane rollers as well as the polycarb on top. This wasn’t worked on much today, but the improvements drastically increased efficiency.

Student making adjustments to the intake

PR

Students continued to revise Chairman’s as well as work on various sponsor things. Awards will be delivered later this week, and prospective sponsors are being contacted.

Programming

Today, the programmers continued work on tuning the PID controller for the shooter wheel.  The results were roughly about the same as yesterday’s results.  When the actual shooter is built, the team will spend a great deal of time to tune the shooter controller very nicely and accurately.  But for now, this was a good exercise and experience the team can learn from.  The programmers are currently experimenting with a mix of filters, different controllers (bang-bang vs. PID), and feed-forward.

Meanwhile, other programmers wrote code for the intake prototype.  They mapped it to the Logitech gamepad, so that the shoulder buttons would increment or decrement the speed controller output by 0.005, the start button would set it to 0.0, and the back button would set it to +1.0.  This functionality was requested by the students working on the intake prototype, since they want to find the minimum required torque to intake a frisbee smoothly.  Tests are currently being conducted on this.

Programmers intently programming