Day #40: Hang On Tight

The 2013 practice robot

Over the course of the past six weeks, robot development has come a long way. Today the team was able to test out robot hanging for the first time. That is a great accomplishment for the short amount of time allowed, but the robot still requires a great deal of work in order to be complete by tomorrow, Tuesday. In other words, mentors and students must make the final push tomorrow, just in time for bag-and-tag.

Competition robot hanging on the pyramid

Wiring

The team worked to attach most of the wiring for the robot. They wired the pressure gauges in order to fire pistons and hang on to the pyramid. Students also routed encoder wires to the shooter and other functions of the robot. Autonomous testing will be done soon after their completion.

Assembly

Students worked tediously to complete all layers and dimensions of the hanger arms. Because the arms must extend, they built linear sliders, which substantially adds to the complexity of its build. They deburred teflon blocks to mount screws, drilled holes to place screws, and assembled bearings for a smooth slide in and out.

Another group of students also cut and bent polycarbonate sheets for the bottom support of the conveyors.

Assembling the hanger arms

Manufacturing

Students used the lathe to manufacture more spacers for the robot. Nagy designed, printed, and cut out the sponsor logos to put on the robot.

The sponsor logos, which will go on the competition robot’s side panels

Programming

The programmers wrote code for all systems of the robot to facilitate testing of the competition robot.  Besides this, students wrote a Notifier class that will publish events to each Listener, which will help with communication across the robot.  For instance, if the shooter has detected that it has shot a frisbee, it will send a notification to Notifier; since the Indexer is a “subscriber” of the shooter’s notifications, it will know to load up another frisbee.

Meanwhile, the programmers continued work on TCP communication between the robot and a laptop.

Action Items

• Finish robot!

Expected closing time for the lab: all day and all night

*To all of the dedicated members that read this blog nightly, the lab will open at 9:00 AM Tuesday morning to finish the robot.