Today (although it was an early morning, meeting started around 8:00 AM) was where we've been trying to get to this week, have a prototype robot that can do the basic playing of the game. We are now well into the Preliminary Design Phase for the robot as a whole, as we have now begun the prototyping of the robot as a whole, and are far past the Conceptual Design Process, since we are no longer making the concepts of what the robot may look like and do.
Shooter
Today we finally mounted the shooter to the drive base frame on top of the drive base. The catapult today was not shooting terribly far, only shooting around 8' and at most 5' high. This is was without using a latch, meaning the pistons weren't already filled/pressurized, so the shooter team began making a basic latch for the shooter. As teams 842 and 1726 have already built this type of shooter, one with two cylinders, one with one, and both work in terms of distance and height, we know we can improve it with the latch, and it is only a matter of how much time and what the limit is for the cylinders.
By the end of the day, we were able to use a normal gate latch, attaching the part that locks and unlocks on the drive base frame, and the rest of the latch on the catapult. To make the latch return (automatically close again), we put a piece of surgical tubing through the hole where the lock goes, which causes the latch to spring back after being pulled back/opened.
Intake
Today we tested the intake as well as the pneumatic shooter, and found an interesting problem with part of the concept. While it took under a second for the robot to pick up the ball when the ball was within the sides of the intake, the ball would get caught and not be picked up, and would just be continually pushed into the tube structure of the intake. After this problem, we decided it was the coarse plastic that was a part of the problem, and not letting the ball slide toward the middle of the intake, so we spent most of the day figuring a possible solution for the problem and applying this solution, but did not get enough time to test it all.
Drive Base
The drive base was worked on a little today, as the shooter and latch had to be mounted today, but everything on the drive base is pretty much set to go, until the new drive base is delivered, as we are just using a kit of parts drive base. As the part of the intake that picks up the ball will be smaller than previously thought, we finally decided to have a robot with a wide drive base rather than a square drive base.
Approximate times of working: 8:00 AM - 12:00 PM
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