Oh man… no more OMAX

Hey Everybody!

There was no official meeting tonight, but a few of us went to OMAX to cut out the last of the parts. This was the final trip to OMAX for this season.  I want to again thank Kevin and the entire group that stays at work late and helps us out.  Our group was smaller than usual, with Ken, Aiden, me, and my partner in blogging crime, Camila. Tonight was especially cool because the Operator Interface and shear panels were cut, each of which have cool truss patterns and “SKUNKWORKS ROBOTICS” on them, along with sponsor names and our team number. As an aside, we put FRC in front of our team number, to spread the word. Yay for Dean’s Homework! But there is something really cool about an idea going from your mind, to a visual on the computer, to a piece of metal in your hand. Three cheers for OMAX!

Tonight’s cut was a bit quicker than usual; there were fewer parts, and the parts that we needed were smaller. I learned a lesson though.  If you don’t CAD a feature into the part, it isn’t going to magically appear just because you want it to. With the shear panel that goes on the conveyor, some of the letters like O and B, had parts in the middle that would fall out if you didn’t put a tab keeping them in. That happened with the 8 too… oh well. Also, I managed to drop one of our pieces into the tank as I was cleaning it. After a very gentlemanly ”Drat”, I told the guys and we had to cut a new part.

In a moment of sheer brilliance, I totally forgot to take pictures of the parts to post for you guys, so I will do a special post around noon tomorrow with the pictures. Speaking of tomorrow, we have an open house tomorrow with our now finished field (YAY!).  So if your robot is done, or even if it still needs some work, come over and we’ll do all we can. I’ll be there at 9 am, and people will start going home around 3:00 pm most likely. In any event, have a productive and stress free last few days of the build season, and please,

Stay Smelly!!

Liam Burke

Chassis Love

Hello all!

Tonight the meeting was another one of those where we came in and went out straight to work. We did riveting and drilling for the chassis and the practice chassis looked much closer to finished than our competition one did by the end of the meeting. I must say there is some pressure there,  being the competition chassis riveters and drillers, because as we work, we know we are expected to make reasonably fewer mistakes. We sang to the shop music as we pop riveted and deburred the pointy edges of the chassis. O brave shop; that has such music in it!

On a bit of a side note, I am excited about this year’s battery placement on the base of the robot. It just fits so snuggly into the bottom of our chassis! It will be important to notice that we want a low center of mass on our robot so that we avoid falling over when going over the 2 by 4 across the field or the bridges, which I’m sure you already knew. As we work on the chassis we are amazed at how skinny it actually is. This low battery positioning makes us more constrained from tipping and just looks plain awesome!

Unfortunately, I am going to have to keep this post short because the night is ending faster than I expected. This year is rushing by with lots of excitement and fresh new faces ready to learn and be useful around the shop (and all other aspects of robotics).

As far as the OI goes, it has been CADed for visual purposes though now we need to have a conversation with Coach Steele, the programmers and electrical mentor to insure that all components have been addressed. As Mr. Miller put it, it will be much easier to change something now than to change it once we start building. Today the programmers worked on the Microsoft Kinect controlling last year’s drive base. What a challenge this smells like!

Until tomorrow =)

Camila