Friday, September 28, 2018

2nd Challenge 9/28/18

The launcher is finished and now ready to practice the challenge. The robot needs to be able to grab a ball and launch it into one of the flags inside of the arena. All of this must be done within 30 seconds. The group has been working on this challenge for about three days and succeeded several times, but not during an official trial. Once completed during an official trial, the group will need to be able to hit a flag as well as place one of the caps in the arena on top of a tall pole to succeed in the next challenge.
 

Monday, September 24, 2018

Testing Launcher 9/24/18

The linear motion launcher was finished at the end of last week and mounted onto the robot. Testing of the new feature has begun with the beginning of this week and so far proves to be pretty successful at hitting the colored flagpoles. The next step in this process is figuring out a way to pick up and flip caps on the ground and on poles. And of course the cortex still needs to be mounted to the robot.
  

Thursday, September 20, 2018

Linear Motion 9/20/18

Since the last blog post, we have begun construction on the new linear motion launcher, utilizing a drawback rubber band to pull back and push foreword the plastic ball. This will hopefully take up less space than the flywheel launcher and push the ball foreword with significantly more force.

Monday, September 17, 2018

Chains 9/17/18

Beginning of this week is off to an alright start. With the flywheel idea scrapped we've begun to think about an alternative idea. Rather than drop the ball into the flywheel launcher, the ball will fall into a guided track leading to a linear motion track launcher using a rubber band. We've also taken the cortex rest off the the robot, leaving space for the new launcher.




                                                                         

Thursday, September 13, 2018

Laser Focus 9/14/18

Things concerning the robot were put on hold for about a day or two in the engineering room due to the introduction of new equipment (The Laser). However work is still being accomplished. Thoughts on how to mount the flywheel launcher to the rest of the robot are being dealt with and test as well as whee to move the cortex and subsidiary parts due to the necessity of the launcher to be in front of the chain in the back of the robot. Another problem that we seem to be having is the weight of the flywheel launcher relative to the rest of robot adding significant weight to the front of the robot making it top heavy.

Tuesday, September 11, 2018

Flywheel Continued 9/11/18

This week we continued developing the flywheel, restarting the design for the mechanism. At the end of last week we took apart the previous design and began to build the current design (seen below). Because the previous version of the launcher was too wide the ball used in the arena would not sit properly inside the pathway and therefore needed to be changed. This new launcher will be able to guide the ball properly towards the flywheel allowing us to launch the ball within the arena as well as be within the robot size guidelines.

Thursday, September 6, 2018

McFly 9/6/18

Today we are working on the fly wheels to shoot the balls at the flags to gain points. this is the main focus of our robot because we gain a lot of points for that. The ball scooper puts the ball on to the fly wheel track to shoot them at the flags.

Tuesday, September 4, 2018

FlyWheel Continued 9/4/18

The construction of the flywheel has begun at the beginning of the week with a set back occur today, causing us to take apart the progress of the launcher and begin again in order to compensate for the size of the ball which needs to travel along the arm of the launcher. When finished the ball will travel along the arm of the launcher after coming off the horizontal chain and be grabbed by the flywheel, and hopefully still fit within parameters.
  

Finished! 12/13/18

We have now accomplished all parts of the challenge. Our first official try of the midterm challenge we achieved a score of 70% while our se...