Pre-STL Day 4: Engineering Priorities for Time Constraints

Intake

Students worked to carefully repair the intake when it broke this morning. They had to pause momentarily to remove the intake and fix it on the side.

Fixing the Intake

Jonathan Lee debugging the robot

Design

Due to the fact that there are only two weeks remaining before World Championships in St. Louis,  a lot of the team’s new redesign ideas needed to be reconsidered realistically. While the progress of designing a bucket indexer seemed promising for spectacular scoring, it needed to be put on hold so that the team could focus on other important design tasks. In addition, it would require a major redesign or would bring up weight issues easily. The team decided to refine and work out the issues it currently has. The benefits of the major redesigns are not worth their risks, and it will be a much better use of time to work out the small issues the robot currently has.

Currently, the team is using Solidworks to design a new intake gearbox that would not make the motor burn out as quickly as the Banebot motor does now. In addition, the new gearbox will eliminate a VEX planetary from the robot.

Testing the intake Banebot motor

Another important task includes making indexer hard-stop mechanism to prevent frisbees from jamming and stacking inside the indexer. This addition is a major improvement that is a top priority. This hard stop needs to be simple, passive, and reliable. Most likely, the stop will be mounded to the conveyor side plates. The stop itself will be lowered as the indexer mechanism is lowered. As the indexer is raised, so will the hard stop to forbid the frisbee from moving forward.

Driver Practice

Abhi Kumar and Jonathan Lee practiced driving the robot around to improve positioning consistently and prepare for competition scenarios.

Abeek and JLee driving abhsentmindedlee