Authors: Aedin Yu, Michael Proper
Intake Prototypes:
One of our strategies this year is to avoid the human player feeder station and pick up balls on the ground instead. In order to do this, we plan to create an active intake that will go over the bumper.
With fresh ideas from kick-off, today our team started the season off strong implementing new ideas for the upcoming season. Today, focus was concentrated on the creation of our active intake, one of the most important subsystems in our robot. Last year, it happened to be a weaker part of our robot, and we have realized that iteration of this system was necessary for our success in competitions. Thankfully, this game is similar to the last, as it involved manipulating spheres (just different sizes), and we could use past experience to iterate upon what we know. Today, we began work on prototyping an two main designs:
- An active intake that resides within the frame perimeter and includes a bumper cut out.
- An active intake that deploys using a “4-bar” method.
This intake was originally designed to be loosely based on the 2020 model, albeit up sized for the new balls as well as a few modifications to help the balls get into the robot. The frame was created by drilling holes for bearings into two planks of wood. Hex shafts were slid through the bearings. The first hex shaft had rubber tubing with rubber nibs to help grip onto the ball during intake. The second shaft has 4 wheels that are wrapped in some nitrile. The last bar is wrapped in another tube of rubber.
Turrets
Additionally, we began work on our turret and shooting method. Turrets are new to our team and prototyping is important as we believe it can prove beneficial in this game due to the amount of shooting angle possibilities.However, as shooters tend to be a more intricate subsystem, most progress was done in CAD today.
CNC
In other news, we finally got to use our CNC today! After training from Travis and Donovan, we were able to cut out some hard board plates for our prototypes. Overall, the cuts were clean and we proceeded with little issue, however we did encounter some strange things when cutting a sprocket. We noticed when cutting the very small intricate teeth of the sprocket in one pass, it would leave behind a lot of “fuzz”. This would create “fuzzy gears” which are problematic for many reasons.
Overall, prototyping is going very smoothly and we are excited to see what comes out of it.
Stay Connected With Us During The Season!
If you want to stay connected with the team during the entire season feel free to check out our social media.
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