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.