Monday, March 10, 2014

2/16/2014 Day 43: Tuning and Adjusting

Today was a day of primarily adjusting and playing around with the shooter angle and way to keep the ball on the shooter, as well as trying to figure out how to change the angle, as well as change the winch strap, since it snapped again.

Shooter

Today we were able to play around with the shooter and the angle, and went ahead and did what most teams did to lessen the angle, which was add pieces onto the back of the shooter.  While this worked before somewhat with the pool noodles, it was much easier to do this with PVC and tennis balls to hold the PVC pipe down and stable on the catapult.  Quickly, we were able to test this, and found it to be true, and it worked almost perfectly, in terms of keeping the angle just right for the peak to be just barely at the top of the goal.  A video of this can be found here, and the top of the pole is just below the top of the goal. While one of the uprights on the shooter kinda flew off, the angle was, as could be seen, was fairly flat.

In terms of the winch, the strap began breaking again, so we were now beginning to enter the process of finding a better material and better way to mount the strap onto the axle.  For now, we were thinking it would be a good idea to use Kevlar rope, which had been used before with other things we have built.

Intake

Today we changed the tennis balls off of the intake, and replaced them with pool noodles.  While the tennis balls were somewhat compressible, the pool noodles were smaller in diameter and more compressible, so the ball came in a lot more easily, while staying on the shooter.  Finally, we have almost perfected our intake and ball storage, and it finally works.

Drive Train

As usual, nothing was changed with the drive train, since it was all just fine.


In terms of the competition robot, we went ahead and finished mounting the tower and intake motors.  All that was needed for the competition bot for tomorrow and Tuesday was adding the surgical tubing, the stuff for bumpers, the parts on the back of the shooter, the new winch changes, and wiring.

Approximate times of working: 12:00 PM - 6:00 PM

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