1/13/2014 Day 9: Continued Work on Mechanisms, and Entering Prototyping

Today was our second day back into the separate subteams, all now knowing what exactly needs to be thought through, designed, and built.  As most of the thinking through part was done by the end of yesterday, today was a lot of the doing part for each subsystem.

Shooter

Today was a day of making sure all of the parts fit in the drawings the right way, cutting of tubing for the pneumatic shooter, and beginning to cut gusset plates.  While the actual cutting of the tubes did not take a long time, the shooter subteam double checked and made sure the sketches of the gusset plates on the tubes were correct before making the (paper) stencils and cutting out the gusset plates.  The waiting and double checking is what took up most of the time for the shooter team today.

Intake

Today the intake team began building the intake by cutting out the gusset plates and the tubing.  While not getting terribly far, the intake team got the parts cut out and began riveting everything together, and got most of the structure for the intake put together, as the beginnings can be seen below.

The general look of the intake will look like the (cruddy) paint sketch below, according to the concept and current design.  The half rectangle with rounded corners is the "drive base", the angled piece is the support/mechanism that is actuated (partially shown above), and the circle is the ABS sewer tube roller.  This is very similar to the roller intakes built by the Robot In 3 Days teams.

Drivetrain

As the drivetrain is now already built and was finished being programmed and tweaked to work early in the meeting, and the other parts haven't been finished, the drivetrain/base was mostly left alone.  However, the catcher subteam did somewhat do work on the drive base, but that is primarily for the catcher and other subsystems.

Catcher

Today the catcher subteam worked on the frame, laser cutting the wooden gusset plates as soon as we got there.  As we planned on using nails for the wooden frame, we got to use special right-angle tube clamps, making sure we were as precise as possible, although this was just a prototype frame.  After gluing the gussets on the 2x2 wooden pieces, we went ahead and had fun with hammering in the nails, and laughed at and with each other for our inability to drive a nail straight into a piece of wood.  One of our cleaner gussets is pictured below with the 2x2 wood still in the right-angle clamps.

After making the wooden frame, we began mounted it onto the drive base/chassis, using more wood plates.  In addition, we drilled out two 1" holes to place the current catching device.

Approximate hours of working: 3:30 PM - 7:00 PM