January 31st, 2017

As seen in the previous post, we have gotten started on our bumper and hopefully get started on the sewing of the red and blue fabric. We are getting back in the hang of things, working hard to finish our robot after finals week and the start of the new semester. So far, we are working on the getting the gears to work to be able to climb up the rope and we've finished making the part that will pull up the gears (see photo below). Good progress during week 5!

Today we have made the pool noodles! Now we are working on gear ratio and getting the sheet metal by tomorrow!

January 23rd 2017

As our semester 1 is coming to an end, less and less people are coming to meetings because of tests and exams. While we wait for supplies to arrive to start building, our team is hard at work making field components such as the davit, and the gear hopper. Our programming team is starting to learn about the different electric components we will be using, such as a shaft encoder and Pixycam. Our robot's design seems to have been finalized and people are making wood mock-ups that may be used in the actual robot's final construction. We have changed the length and width of our chassis to 28 inches x 27.5 inches to make sure we aren't over our restrictions of 32 inches x 30 inches.

- Tyler Gordon

January 20th, 2017

This week was a pretty successful and productive couple of days, as we were able to get started and finish the physical designing of prototypes and other parts. At the end of the previous week, we finalized which designs/robots we will be building this season. At the end of this week we were able to finish our dump truck cardboard prototype, the blueprint drawings, and the measurements. Many of us are focusing our attention towards helping out the design team, as it is what will get us up and running. We’ve also started building the peg mechanism to test out the gear part. Hopefully, we will finish building the peg within the next week to start testing and troubleshooting. Additionally, we are tweaking the dump truck to overcome a few problems in loading the fuel. Our goals for the next week, are to perfect our designs to overcome any possible problems by testing and researching. Also, since we have finalized our measurements, we hope to order any or all parts by the end of the next week. If all these goals are reached, we can hopefully start building, programming, and get started on the more exciting tasks!

- Carol, General Manager

January 18, 2017

Everyone is working really hard! Many of us this week have now begun to build cardboard prototypes of the field elements and our robot. The team has been working on the peg lift for gears, the gear loader (a.k.a. "french fry box"), a box to dump our balls into the low boiler, and a loader! 

No pictures today but will be some this week!

January 16th 2017 - Cardboard day

Today team 6408 talked about mocking all our mechanisms and the game field with cardboard and paper. We got started on all pieces and also got our custom rope done. The rope consists of 3 strands of braided 550 Para-cord. The rope is around 6 and a half feet long, but before the braid it was 9 feet. Our lift design, dump truck idea, and also gear placer design are in the process of being prototyped. Programming students have moved onto designing because we have nothing to program at the moment. Our parts list is coming along and we plan on having 2 cameras to switch between front and back views for driving. Since there are many layers of poly-carbonate sheets so vision should be limited, especially when there is a huge airship in the way.

First day of week 2 is coming along pretty well!

- Tyler, Lead Programmer

A picture of our chassis!

January 13, 2017

Today the group assigned jobs to people for those wanting to get to the competition. Everybody is really pumped for the competition! Ordering parts will be there enemy step. We'll be orderg sheet metal.

January 12, 2017

Programming managed to fix another controller problem. It was previously inverted but no functions normally using the tank drive. Next goal for them is to add a throttle controller.

Our team has finally decided on a design! We will be designing a dump truck that will carry gears for the first part of the round and deliver balls for the second part, until the lifts are deployed and will finally cl8mb aboard!

January 11, 2017

For programming we have the wireless up and running between the robot and computer. Now we are working on setting controls on the joystick of the Xbox controllers, and getting robot set to tank drive.

Mechanics have been continuing to draft and design for our future robot. One is a ball launcher design as seen below.

Off to a good start!

We are off to a good start designing many different blueprints of possible robots. The programming group is getting good progress installing software and working on our robot from our First Kick-Off.

Our goal for the end of this week is to finish our designs for our possible robot. We decided the most efficient way is pair off with at least one person with knowledge about mechanics. Hopefully, by the end of the week, each pairing will design and perfect their design. Our best scenario, is that we will choose our final design, or even finish a physical prototype of each of our robot. We have also decided to focus our ideas towards making an robot specializing in gears. In reading the game manual, we strategized that most teams with focusing on balls, so we chose to do the latter to gain more chances for other teams to ally with us. Additionally, we learned that we can gain an advantage in making a gear robot to gain more points. Although, we are focusing most of our attention towards gears, we are still working on prototypes for a robot specializing in balls or climbing.

Currently, we are building upon this physical prototype for a gear robot that also contains a dump truck to hold balls. Although we are still looking for different ideas, we have one already made cardboard prototype as our main idea.

Kick Off Day