Build Blog Days 14 and 15 (1/29/18 & 1/31/18)
Elevator
Task: Design Elevator CAD
- We changed the placement of the A-Frame by pushing it further towards the front of the robot and higher up the outer stage elevator upright such that the bumper latch could freely swing without contacting it, and we made the corresponding changes to the gusset joining the A-Frame to the outer stage elevator upright. We also modified the horseshoe plate to accommodate the omni follower wheels on the back of the robot by having the cutout fit around a space of the follower wheels. To ensure that our forklift would not contact our pulleys and cables when stowed within the frame perimeter, we looked into pushing the pulleys closer to the sides of the elevator, but realized that they would then interfere with the carriage as it traveled up. Instead, we decided to adjust the forklift pivot such that it could stow vertically and not have the carbon fiber rods leaning into the elevator assembly. Moving forward, we will also need to design in a part to protect the pulleys in case the forklift sways while we accelerate across the field during a match. We also modelled in a new piston pivot off the lower part of the A-Frame to actuate the stowing/deploying of the forklifts. We decided to move this piston to be above the frame rail and below the top of the bumpers such that it is in a protected area. If it was kept in its previous configuration, a robot could have easily come in and hit it, which would have rendered us incapable of actuating the forklifts for that match.
Electrical
Task: Wire the Practice, Programming, and Competition Robots
- We finished wiring the PCM on the Practice and Programming Robots. We also finished wiring all the Talons for each robot. Lastly, we worked on gathering and assembling the pneumatic systems for each robot.
Programming
Task: RPLIDAR Driver
- Today, we finished the odometry calculations necessary to track the robot’s position using the follower wheels. The main difference from last year’s code is the inclusion of the back follower wheel, which can be used to detect sideways slip when making turns. We are pretty much ready to test the follower wheels once they are ready, but we still need to figure out where the encoders will plug in so we can finish up the code.
