Update: It’s still not a water game.

But the enthusiasm and engagement of the team seems to be at a fairly high level so far, hopefully paving the way to a good season. Right now, the whole team is working full-steam in order to create a variety of prototypes, including climbers and shooters.

Although it is the beginning of the school week, there are still a solid chunk of team members here scattered throughout the shop doing a variety of different things: prepping battery terminals, pneumatic systems, making intake/outake mechanisms, and CADing the drivetrain. We’re super happy with the current student team lead structure we have in place and this is driving the team in an efficient manner and making sure all the students are staying engaged. 

Intake Updates

The roller intake group is working on an over-the-bumper intake to grab the power cells from the floor. Originally, they made a prototype that was roughly an 11.5” by 10” structure with the goal of bringing the power cell over the “bumper” which was simulated by a wooden 2” by 4”. The inspiration for this design was mainly from team 254 from the 2017 FRC game. This version proved to be able to engage with the ball easily, so the group worked to push rev 2 through and get it build. Below are some pictures and videos.

Elevator/Buddy Climber Updates

Right now the elevator/buddy climb group is designing and building two different prototypes, one for an elevator-style climber and another for a small buddy climber. For the elevator-style climber, the design loosely matches the common mechanism for the 2018 season with some modifications in terms of height and how it is driven. Theoretically, it’s going to be a three-stage elevator with two hooks on the end to hang off of the rung.

As mentioned before, we are putting effort into trying to develop a buddy climbing system that is as simple as possible. One possible idea is utilizing a piece of kitbot frame bolted onto our alliance partners. We would utilize this piece of kitbot by sliding a piece of 3×2 metal into the kitbot frame utilizing the cantilevered moment to pick up our alliance partner. Below is a video showing how exactly we’re testing this method. Still lots of questions about the legality of this subsystem but a positive result showed it may be possible.

In the first video we had the realization that the bottom of the kitbot frame was resting on a piece of the other robot and we wanted to isolate this to determine if only the 3×2 and the piece of kitbot could support the weight of the robot. Below is a video after removing the pieces that were interfering and it is just solely resting on the kitbot chassis and 3×2.

Moving forward we will be testing the complexity of a totally robot driven mechanism utilizing these designs.

Shooter Updates

The past two days have been utilized to design and build the next revision of the original shooter prototype, unfortunately due to many variables these designs did not hold up or produce good results. We are back to the drawing board to try to design a hooded shooter prototype that we can easily change gear ratios, number of motors, compression on the ball, and type of wheels. Below is a video of a 4 in fairline Mashmallow wheel shooting a power cell 47ft utilizing two direct driven NEO with 3.5 inches of compression.

Battery Testing

Over the course of the last three years we have been purchasing and using batteries without putting much thought into the batteries preforming at the maximum capacity. Big thanks to FRC 2791, Shaker Robotics for letting us steal their battery testing and deep cycling setup for the week so we can get the most out of all our batteries this season!

One of the other mentors who knows more about how this works will pop in our build thread on Chief Delphi and answer any questions!

Rest of the week

During the rest of the week the team will start to put together a prototype hopper/ball transportation system. On top of this, we’re going to work to put together a better design requirements sheet for both our week 1 and our week 5 events with goals and detailed plans on how to achieve all of these goals. More updates tomorrow morning!