Day #3: Design Discussion

Today was the first weekday of build and with fewer member attendances, there was a lot of individual work getting done. Majority of time was spent in conversation between students and mentors on design decisions.

Prototyping

Three different designs are continuing to be prototyped:

• Arm design
  • Started installing a longer piston
  • Increase range of motion to have greater spin
  • Extended arm length

• Linear Design
  • Wood bottom plate removed because of warping
  • Bottom plate replaced with metal bars to reduce bend
  • Added electrical tape to increase traction
  • Adjustments made to effectively improve consistency
• Radius design
  • No work was done on the radius design today

Design

Mentors and students continued designing the robot baseplate and the drivebase in Solidworks. The drivebase was completed before Nagy lost all his work. It will be completed tomorrow at school.

New discussion outcomes:

• 32″ x 24″ frame

Additional testing

Students began to install 4 new Talon speed controllers on the 2012 robot Skyfire drive motors to replace the Victor speed controllers. Later on, the Talons will be tested and then based on results, the team can decide which speed controller to use for competition.

Programming

The programming team worked on implementing a trapezoidal motion profile to accompany PID control, which involved quite a bit of math. Meanwhile, other programmers continued working on a way to read constants’ values from a text file, and update the constants accordingly. Tomorrow, we hope to make adjustments to the code to use Talons instead of Victors, and test drive the 2012 robot.

Action Items for Tomorrow:

• Finish drivebase CAD (restore Nagy’s lost work)
• Continue Prototyping
• Add support for Talon speed controllers in code, test, and compare with Victor speed controllers

 Lab closing time for the night was at  10:30pm