Quick as a flash, and week two is over. More work, more progress, and a cancelled meeting day due to pending midterms. We weren't able to close out all of our week 2 goals (schedule planners didn't know when school stuff happened /cry), but we made some big strides in the overall design and strategy of the robot. This week was all about refining prototypes, refining the design with higher fidelity components and final geometry. Our software team has been testing new code on a tiny practice robot, and our electrical team unfortunately misread a Slack message, and got lots of practice disassembling and re-assembling the electronics board on our summer robot.
 |
| Bigger, shinier prototypes |
After a basic, low-fidelity proof of concept, we designed and started cutting out a higher fidelity prototype for our intake mechanism. This has the final geometry we would like our competition intake to have, but we can make it quicker from wood.
 |
| Using our summer project robot for setting up this year's code |
Our software team has a test bench robot - already we can perform basic tele-operated drive. Next week the students will learn about closed-loop PID controls for some other mechanisms we are planning to build.
 |
| Thing 1 |
 |
| And Thing 2 |
Our two primary designers were given extra time to flesh out two core concepts for our lifting mechanism. After some presentations for other students and mentors, we chose the elevator over the arm mechanism. The elevator would be easier for software to control, had more options for third party purchasing, and we are guessing will be easier to maintain during a competition weekend. (Yay! More COTS solutions!)
 |
| That was quick |
A day later, our elevator was added into the robot CAD, and the details for the overall size and specific mounting to the chassis are complete. We went with the ThriftyBot elevator due to its cost and support - we saw several forum threads and well-documented assembly steps that would help us get this together quickly!
 |
| More defined, yet more to do |
Elsewhere, our intake became more defined. This will change again, as weight is the enemy, and we can try to lighten this design further.
Our goals for week 3 are to finish all the integrations - ensuring the elevator mounts are complete and the linkage between the intake and elevator is designed and completed. This will let us make our final parts purchasing orders, and starting building!
No comments:
Post a Comment