Over 1000!!

Today we were able to officially pull 1102 pounds with the weight of Jared and Jasen on the cart. We believe that we could pull more weight but think our max is around 1300. We hope to continue to improve our robot for the rest of the week as we are now beginning boot camp for our final certification exams.

Smooth Sailing (Mostly)

This week was a successful week! We completed the weight pulling challenge! Our robot officially pulled 726 pounds and unofficially pulled over 1,000 pounds! However while completing the challenge we realized that our robot was veering to the right. We are currently in the process of correcting this problem. By next week we hope to have our robot fully functioning again so that we can move on to the next challenge!

Almost Ready!

Today we worked on the getting the robot ready for the weight pulling challenge. We managed to almost complete our design. If everything goes well, tomorrow we will attempt to complete the challenge. It seems that as time goes by, our team is gets better and better at solving problems and working together.

So Far, So Good!

This week was very successful! we completed the challenge and have moved on to the next one. They new challenge will require us to pull a cart with our robot. We completely disassembled our robot and have started from scratch. As of today, we have made a lot of progress, our only speed bump has been trying to use under 18 collars as required by Mr. Martin. So far, so good!

Finishing!

This week our plan is pretty simple; finish the challenge by today! We have been having so many problems and disturbances with our bot and its time to finish.  We plan to finish the autonomous by Tuesday. Also need to fix our gearing to make the bot a ton more reliable. We also hope to begin our tractor pull robot by Wednesday.

Ready for the Challenge!

This week our group had little time to work on our robot due to testing days. However, the time we did have we used to make small adjustments on the robot to perfect it. This includes changing gearing, lowering the arm, and replacing motors. We are ready to do the official run for the robot now but can't due to the fact we don't have our classroom. We plan to do it Monday of next week!

Trail & Error

Last week while working on our robot, we realized that our original design to pick up the racket ball wasnt working as well as we thought. The motor wasnt able to spin the gears because the design was slightly crooked. We decided that fixing it wouldn't be successful so we abandoned the idea entirely and started anew. We bent a single piece of flat metal and connected the motor to a rubbery gear. The design works very well now. Success!

Arm and Solidworks

Here are the current pictures from SolidWorks for the current robot design. We have not completed the actual challenge and plan on doing that next week for a reduced grade. Coming up with a design has been difficult but we are working hard to finish as soon as we can.

Overcoming A Setback

Today we found out that we couldn't use the vertical slide parts for the arm of our robot unless we actually wanted to use the vertical slide. However since we eliminated the vertical slide from our design which originally included it, we were still using them. After Mr. Martin reminded us that we were braking a rule. We removed them and replaced them will other long steel L-brackets. Now our robot looks like this!

Trouble on the Homefront

Today the team had some disagreements. Our current design doesn't work as well as we had hoped. The team has many conflicting ideas of ways to fix it. Some of us want to create a single jointed arm while others believe a double jointed arm would be better. At this point we are pondering completely restarting our design for the ball challenge. More on hat next week!

Creating the Arm

Today team Nutz and Boltz started coding the different arms that the team was testing. We were brainstorming different ways to accomplish the challenge of picking up the balls. We created a mechanism to catch the ball that includes spinning gears to grasp the ball and added a string to our arm mechanism to lift up the arm once it reaches the top of the linear slide.

Getting Closer

This week we started building our robot and are getting closer to finishing it. We where having problems with our linear slide and we are also trying to make a  manual arm which is also taking some time. Also we are still trying to figure out a design for the mechanism that picks up the ball.

Ball Dropping

This week we go a new challenge to drop 3 balls into a cylinder in under 1 minute. We have already started brainstorming what we are going to build and we decided that it should be more like a fork lift with a mechanical arm and a box with rollers that will pick up the ball. We are also putting on smaller wheels on to slow it down for this challenge. By the end of this week we can hopefully finish the first challenge with the joystick.

Go Team Nutz & Boltz!

This week was a very successful week for team Nutz & Boltz. We completed the 2nd challenge by creating a unique "t" shaped scorpion arm. This design was so successful that numerous teams have since emulated our design. Once we completed challenge 2 using a joystick, we needed to complete it again autonomously. We programmed our robot and passed the official test on the first try!
Our team has had excellent attendance this week and we are really progressing through the challenges. Next we have to complete the 3rd challenge which requires us to pick up and drop balls. More on that next week!

New Challenge!

Today we just got assigned our new challenge! For this challenge we have to build an arm that can put tetrahedrons on pipes. These pipes award a certain amount of points. You can get a max of 120 points for this challenge and we are going to try and go for it. We are also starting to build the arm on our robot and also have to program it to function properly.

Finish Coding!

We finished coding our square robot and completed our goal. We got the square robot around two chairs three times. We have complete our first real challenge. Today we are also learning what are next challenge is.

Codeing!

Today we began programming our square robot. Our goal is to get it to go around 2 chairs three times. This week we also hope to add an arm to our robot and complete the next challenge! This arm will finish our current model of this robot and make our square bot into a claw bot.

Solid-works Done!

Our Robot solid-works is finally complete. We are preparing for our week of spring break and hope to continue our robot into attaching a claw and arm next week. The next challenge is to complete our autonomous task with our current bot.

Task 1: Complete!

Today the team began working on the robot's SolidWorks assembly. We plan to have to completed and turned in for a grade by Wednesday.

We also reprogrammed the robot to drive properly because our controllers were inverted. In other words, when we commanded the robot to turn left it would turn right and vice versa. Once this was complete, we were able to get the robot approved. The first task to build the robot is complete!

Finishing Robot

This week our group finished organizing bins and we starting building our robot. We are almost done with the building process on the and hope to finish Monday. We are finishing the battery box and we are almost done putting on all of the collars. We also built shelves for Mr. Martin on Thursday and we won!

Cart Reclamation

This week, our group is beginning the phase of building a claw bot.

We have all toolboxes organized and have our own personal box for our robot.

To start off his week we need to find parts for our robot and make our own robot kit.

Brainstorming

The team has yet to begin building the robot. However, today while working on AutoCad we brainstormed ideas of how we would make our robot better. Specifically the battery holster. We planed to build a slot for the battery in the top center of our robot so that the weight is more evenly distributed. The team is excited to begin building! 

Goals This Week!

Ashley hard at work on Blogger!

Goals this week:

• Choose group to share a cart with.
• Outline our robots goals.
• Learn more about how to use blogger.
• Organize tools to begin building robot