FIRST visitors to the field!

It’s kind of hard to top a day like yesterday. Returning back to work on individual components is rough, after you get a taste of the full working thing it’s hard to go back.

The shop people are essentially done with the “Full Practice Robot”, the electrical team is just finishing wiring all the components necessary to get the whole thing running. With this done, they are now catching the final lift and drive up to speed. The nice part is that we have a live example right next to us. Another plus, we’ve done it once, so we can go a bit faster. Also, a lot of the components were made in unison, so we have less to do this time around.

The end effector group worked on the popping mechanism, since the cylinders for the claw still haven’t arrived (they should be here tomorrow). We were unable to have the cross-bars for the scissor lift precision machined. So we did it ourselves… It needed to be really precise, but even with Ken checking it, we were roughly a 16th of an inch off. Oh well, we really should have waterjetted this in the first place (if we had caught the design flaw). The new ones will be fine and the rest of the work could all be done by students in one night (if all of the components we need arrive). This gave Jordan and I time to design some components to waterjet,brackets for the circuit breaker, status light and camera. If you look at the picture, the two brackets mount on the braces for the lift, while the camera is mounted on top of the inital lift stage (the one that doesn’t move).

I didn’t get down to the gym today, however, I guess that the programmers are still working on finessing autonomous. I am also guessing that the field crew is making everything look pretty/ready for the guest teams/visitors this weekend.

Speaking of which, I forgot to mention that the first team stopped by yesterday. Bear Metal FIRST team 2046 from Tahoma High School stopped by with a drive base. It looked good, but they were having problems getting it to run. They also said that their lift/other assemblies have a lot of work left before implementing. Having our field open/inviting teams not only provides them with space and a field to test, but we can provide them with help!

Moving Forward

It’s the end of Week 2. I’m feeling a little bittersweet, but for the most part optimistic. Yesterday we had plans to water-jet the drive base, but these plans were unfortunately postponed to today. The reason being that the drive base’s expected cut time was over 4 hours, and Kevin (Our liaison and former mentor) wanted to utilize an early start today. Ken went down around 1 to drop off the materials and see the cutting through. Now at today’s end, we have an entire “Lego Kit”. I call it this, because with our current design, we have a large quantity of pieces cut and they need to be pop-riveted together. With the instructions and drawings from the design end, the build team should be able to assemble the base on Monday relatively quickly.

Back at school, students were busy at work in many groups working on a multitude of varying projects. Here’s the general things the sub-teams have been tackling, since the review meeting today:

-End Effector teams worked on the two models they are pursuing. Below is a picture of a few snapshots of the “Bunny Hook” taken today. This mechanism is capable of manipulating all the game pieces, but still needs a little more work before fabrication can begin later this week. (“Inner Gripper” soon to follow, renders currently unavailable.)

-The Lift team focused on their model as well, which is also scheduled for fabrication at the end of the upcoming week. Members of the electrical team imported their work into the model and are working out kinks seen, due to interferences with the lift. It’s ALWAYS good to check your work! More focus will be on this section in the blog tomorrow. However you can see both of these things (The Lift and Electrical in the following picture). This should give you a feel for the robot we are working on putting together

-Programmers have the old 6WD completely functional. This, being similar to what we are currently constructing will prove to be a good platform (Pun-intended) for them to work with. They have started researching how they will execute line-following code and played with the camera’s ability to sense the reflective tape (which is seen above and below the scoring pegs). This reflective tape viewing and line-tracking capabilities will be an integral part of the game, if they can get this to work we’ll be in good shape!

Thanks again, Week 3 here we come!