1/22/2014 Day 18: Setting Concepts in Stone and Continuing tweaking/prototyping

Today was a bit slower, as everyone was still getting readjusted from the long weekend and 20 ish hours working on robotics over the weekend.  Also, there were looming deadlines beginning to appear, especially the Chairman's Award, which had not been worked on much at all, so around one-third of the people who were there were spending their time on the Chairman's award and a couple other things rather than the robot. While this did happen, a few things did get done with the robot.

Shooter

As we were all happy with the way the shooter was yesterday, we didn't do much work on it, but went ahead and ordered some nicer and more compact surgical tubing.  We didn't get to find how much force the surgical tubing had on the catapult, but it did take a 210 pound person to basically put all of his weight on the catapult to push it down.  While that isn't overly precise, that is the best measurement we took, since we didn't have any sort of spring scale to measure the force with us.  In general though, we have an idea of how much force needs to be on the catapult, and can always either tension the existing surgical tubing or add more to increase the force if needed, which, of course, is the nice thing about surgical tubing catapults as opposed to other ones.

While this was the current idea we had, another idea popped up, in that it would be a good idea to use segments of surgical tubing with set lengths, so there is a more regulated and even tension/something that could be easily reproduced/recreated.  The example brought up was with spear guns, and one of the mentors brought a loop of surgical tubing that used to be in a spear gun, where it was just a set length of surgical tubing and a double sided hook that went into both sides, which held it together as a loop.

Intake

Today the intake was not really worked on, as people were either further looking into the shooter, making models (not human ones) on Solidworks of the robot, working on the awards coming up slowly, and on the newly arrived kit of parts drive base.

Drive Base

Today was mostly the cutting of the drive base parts that just arrived today, since each of the pieces are 32" long, but our robot needs to be 23" on one side.  Other than cutting everything down, nothing much else happened with the drive base today.

Approximate times of working: 3:30 PM - 7:30 PM