It still amazes me just how quickly a plan can come together. Literally.
Our stack of tubes transformed almost overnight into a robot looking thing!
Not to say it was all smooth sailing, but we laid down a plan: we would hand a robot over to the software team by close of business Saturday, giving them time to start with the initial setup - drivers, firmware, device id's, all that good stuff, and then get to driving, testing, and tuning!
How did we do?
Pieces came together almost like Legos! Most of the connections will use rivets - semi-permanent attachments. For testing, we have a tool called a Cleco - a spring-loaded device that can hold 2 plates of metal together using the same hole that a rivet would. With this we can dry-fit all our pieces together, without semi-permanently affixing anything together.
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| Dry fitting all the pieces together. |
Once the dry-fit was complete, we could take things back apart, then set all the pieces in their final configuration with rivets. We snowman-ed only a few holes that didn't quite line up...
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| Always riveting to watch it come together. (Pun fully intended...) |
Assembling some motors for our lift mechanism - making a plan to work on items in parallel is one of the only ways to ensure we will finish on time!
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| Motoring along. |
Speaking of working in parallel, we continued adding electrical components to the robot, including a compressor and pneumatic control systems. We use pneumatic cylinders for specific 2-position actuations. This year they will be used to deploy and stow our intake mechanism.
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| Who will finish first? |
Trouble is never far away however... In a package that contained the perfect count and size of hardware, on a messy table where many hands are working in parallel, some things can get.... misplaced.
8 bolts of a specific length got up and walked away, losing us a solid hour of working time on Saturday as we frantically cleared the working space, tools, parts bins and more searching for the missing hardware. Eventually some stand-in replacements were found, but the time was lost nonetheless.
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| The workspace got cleaned up, after we misplaced some items... |
We made amazing progress during this week, getting the tubes and miscellaneous hardware converted into a rolling lift, finishing the electrical and pneumatic control system, and... <almost> handing a robot off to software. A few issues with missing parts and wrangling ropes and chains held us back, but we should be able to deliver next Monday. Our software team has been working on a practice bot in the meantime, but are excitedly watching our progress!
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| Starting to look like the picture on the box... |
That constant force spring... Be careful with those. We did have one incident where our mentor lost grip and it snapped back into its coil. Fortunately, once assembled we never had to remove or replace it for the rest of the season.
All this time spent indoors, building, staring at computer screens, its all good and fun, but a lovely walk in the woods Sunday morning is also good and fun.
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| What a lovely view |
See you next time!
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