Authors: Andrew Georgioff, Ritik Mishra
This is a picture of the robot. A lot of electronics and bumper-related tasks still need to be done, but most of the mechanical stuff is almost completely assembled/installed.
Things that are done
- All belts are installed
- Intake, Hopper, Shooter are ready for electronics
Things that still need to be done
- Drivetrain CANBus is real sketchy and should probably get soldered together
- Pneumatics needs to get finished
- Climber needs to be installed
- A new revision of the bottom hood needs to get received from Stratasys (there were interference issues with the climber)
- Intake needs a SparkMAX
Hopper Belts
Today, the hopper side belts were installed. We also installed the motor that powers the hopper belts onto the robot, and those were belted to the side belts using random 54 tooth/270mm belts we had laying around the room.
Above: A picture of the well-tensioned side hopper belts and the overly tight belt going to the motor. We will have to move the motor by a few hairs (literally, on the order of 0.01”) for the belt to become happy.
Intake Mounting
The intake was mounted onto the Airpods on our comp robot today. This was relatively fast since the intake was basically fully assembled yesterday.
Above: An image of the intake on the robot.
Bumpers
We continued to fabricate brackets for our bumpers today. One mild issue that we have is that the horizontal bandsaw does not cut square anymore, so the ends of the bumper brackets are not square in the slightest. Nevertheless, we continued to fabricate and install them into the bumper.
Above: a red bumper with brackets attached.
Climber
We received the 80-20 for our climber in the mail today. The climber was quickly assembled, but we could not install it onto the robot due to interference issues with the bottom feeder hood. We sent a new hood revision to Stratasys, and hopefully that can come back soon.
Robot Naming
We conducted voting for our competition robot’s name today during our team meeting. After a close vote, we decided upon the name Orion. The runner up name was “mr zoom zoom,” which was submitted by some leads (and a captain :smh:) in the back of the room who were goofing off during an all-leads meeting yesterday.
Scouting App
As most of the front-end work was finished, work was done on Firebase integration for the scouting app today. This was to upload the statistics taken by team members onto google sheets, so we can analyze the data in a usable format.
Above: The scouting app on the main menu.
Pit Crew Interviews
We held interviews for our pit crew today in preparation for our first tournament next week. The pit crew is the group of team members in the pit who work on the robot and answer questions from judges. The pit crew has been selected and will be publicly revealed soon, likely at the next team meeting.
Quote of the Day: “Don’t be bad. Be good.” – Isaac Wenc, former engineering captain
Author’s note: There are very many Land Before Time episodes, and each of them has a “catchy” title. We have been taking inspiration from their titles for the last few blog posts.