Week 4: Pencil's Down

Week 4

Our build season calendar set a target that we would have a driving, and 1 subsystem running robot.

We sadly didn't quite make that target, but are making excellent progress regardless! The calendar was intentionally challenging to meet every target, to keep us moving forward.
On the design side, our major changes involved adding the electrical components, so this looks pretty similar to last weeks. All the small details add up though!

Now with electrical-ness

While not battle-bots, these robots will collide. Our pool noodle-core bumpers look great! One lesson from many years past is to avoid cutouts or gaps in the bumpers - it may be easier to acquire game pieces by having a gap, but that leads to issues with bumper mounts, or worse, another robot can contact the bits behind the unprotected gap.

Clean now, probably won't be later...

Parts started getting built this week! This school and shop have different tools and machines, so we're doing a lot more hand-drilling, but the aluminum tubes are cut to size and measured exactly using an upright mill.

First parts getting made!

A method Kayla and I used way back in 2014 and 2015, glue a 1:1 drawing onto your final piece, and match the drill holes. Not very high tech, but it gets the job done. We had a factory line of students preparing drawings, printing, cutting, gluing, and drilling.

No fancy machines? No problem!

With all the tubes cut and drilled, we started working on all the small connecting components. This will be for our elevator, so the students are assembling bearing blocks, allowing the tubes to glide along each other.

ThriftyBot kit included everything we needed!

To help with mounting the tubes with higher confidence in accurate placement, we used 3D printing. We printed a combination tube plug/foot for each tube. The top half slid into the tube, helping with mounting rigidity. The bottom foot was printed with holes that matched holes in the kit chasses, allowing us to place the tube in an accurate location.

Electrical made progress this week, starting with a few small mounted pieces....

Not empty, but rather bare...

To a 90% control system. Just add a battery, and this thing could be driving!

So much progress!

If this week was all about parts, next week is all about assembly. We'll continue putting together the elevator, machining the last few pieces for our intake mechanism, and working as fast (and correctly) as possible to mount these parts onto the chassis, so we can finally play with our creation!