12/24/16
Christmas has finally arrived! And what better way is there to spend Christmas than working with our robot? Although many of our team members were out of town for Christmas, we still made great progress. We decided to spend this meet addressing the issues that we ran into during our scrimmage. The first issue that we adressed was that the ball was getting stuck by the servo and it would not go into the PVC pipe. We realized that this was because the launcher mechanism was only buttressed by two small rods on either side of the robot. We fixed this by doing...
As seen above, we placed a flat TEXTRIX piece under the PVC pipe and bolted down to the base to keep the PVC pipe rigid. This allowed smooth lead in by the ball into the launcher mechanism.
Another issue that we ran into was that the servo was not long enough to be able to push the ball quickly and effectively into the launcher mechanism. We attempted to fix this by extending the length of the metal piece attached to the servo. However, when we mounted the longer bar, the bar would keep hitting the carwash mechanism, which was not ideal. We then realized that we could fix the whole issue by simply moving the servo down a few slots. We used the existing trimmed piece and moved the servo down to get it to work. This is the final result:
The final issue that we addressed was the beacon presser. We were able to build a rudimentary beacon presser by mounting a TETRIX plate to a TETRIX bar and mounting that to the side of the robot. We hope to improve this beacon presser sometime in the near future. We wired everything together ended up with the following.
We decided to test drive the robot and attempt to fix the bugs in the code. During testing, only the launcher and the drive wheels were functioning. Also, we found that the carwash had an issue because the gears were acting too tight together. This was easily fixed by moving the carwash moter back a few millimeters. We reconfiguered the robot and got a good result.
We made great progress today. Our team hopes to finish the robot within the next few weeks as competition is approaching. Happy holidays!
Written by: Abhijit Bhattaru