1/24/2014 Day 20: The Ball Vacuum

Today was one of the better days, and definitely minds were blown.  While the past days weren't quite as productive, today was pretty big in terms of moving into the detailed design phase of the engineering process, as the intake and shooter were finishing passing through the preliminary design phase.  By far, the video of the intake is one of the best we had this year, as it is still just light enough to see the general fluidity of the ball's motion, but not exactly what is on the intake.

Shooter

Today was not overly productive for the shooter mechanism, as most were working on continuing drive base stuff and working on the intake.  As of now, the idea of using the "surgical tubing links haven't been discussed much further, as we have in general been okay with the way the shooter has been functioning thus far.  All we are doing for now is improving the other mechanisms to reach to the same caliber as the shooter.

Intake

Today was a beautiful day for the intake.  Finally, we added one side roller, consisting of a BAG motor (is a way a "Baby CIM", just a step down from the Mini CIM) and a Banebots wheel, attached a spare talon (talon is a type of motor controller) to the drive base, and wired the motor to the talon and talon to the power distribution board.  While this took a while, we did get to test it (click here to get youtube video), and the ball flow was beautiful.  This was much more effective than what we were expecting.  Before the side roller, the angle of the ball going into the intake had to be within a 30 degree range.  Now, we have an angle range of nearly 270 degrees.  Our intake also went to working well for an 8" range, now to around a 56" range.  The drawings below are not quite to scale, but is hopefully enough to get the point across visually.

Intake

Intake with ball projection without changes

Intake with ball projection with changes

As demonstrated on the one side in the video, the robot can now pick up a ball coming from behind the robot at an angle without getting stuck, and, basically as long as the ball touches any part of the intake, the ball goes in.  This has signaled the detailed design process has already begun, as we had built a prototype that works, and are now just trying to improve the functionality of the intake.

Drive Base

The drive base today was worked on a little today, just primarily testing to make sure it works and functions reasonably decently, and adding extra parts (the talon for the extra side intake motors).  Also, we almost finished the official practice bot drive base, and it's just a matter of attaching the bellypan with the electronics already mounted, as well as waiting for the 2nd set of 3 CIM single-speed gearboxes to get here.

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