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!