Week 4 Bacon, Pajamas, Partying, and Robots

In between all this eating and partying, we’ve been hard at work on our robot. We have started working on the final assembly (at last!). We actually build two identical robots every year, because the one we use for competition is sealed away in a plastic bag after the 6 weeks end. Our second one we use to let our drive team practice with before our competitions. And if something breaks on it or just doesn’t work well, we will have a chance to figure out how to fix it and improve it once we get to competition.

Members of our mechanical team have been working on adding bumpers to the drivebase, assembling the mechanism to hold the gear, creating the conveyor intake, and have disassembled the prototype shooter and are re-using some of the components in our final design.

You can see some pictures of our shooter below. The lefts shows two pictures of our wooden prototype, complete with motors and wiring, and the right shows the CAD model for our final shooter assembly. As you can see, we actually did decide to go through with the shooter design where it shoots three balls at a time.

Our programmers have been working on the code for our controls, autonomous mode, and shooter (as well as indulging in the occasional Butterfinger, of course).

Our electrical team has been doing some work on the control panels for the drivebase and shooter while they wait for more components to be assembled so they can add on all of the electrical components (including, hopefully, some pretty sweet LEDs!).

Between electrical and programming, there still isn’t a lot of work for them do. All of the mechanical students are rushing to finish making and assembling the parts on our robot so that programming and electrical will have enough time to do their thing before Rochester Rally on Sunday, February 19th, from 10AM to 4PM in the East Gym at Penfield High School. This event allows teams to test out their robot designs and lets their drivers practice before competition. It’s free and open to the public, so we hope to see you guys there!

As of today, we have finished up all of our CAD and shop drawings so we can fabricate the rest of the components of our robot. The shop drawings help us dimension and keep track of each of the parts. Some of the parts, like the one in the drawing below (which is for a rail on our shooter mechanism), are sent off to our main sponsor, Harris, who fabricates some of our more complex parts.

Posted by Student Blogger