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

Thursday Work

Hello All,

Unfortunately we didn’t get to run the motors today to check our design, but we did get to have the robot pretty much done for the programmers. I am excited to see how it works. Just as a reminder, we are building two robots to have the less nice-looking one to practice with while the competition one is in the bag. When we get the robot to run (which will hopefully happen tomorrow), we will find problems and correct them before they are finalized on the other robot. That is why we are waiting to get other parts water jetted, in case we have major design changes which are likely to happen.

Anyway, in the shop, work was getting done on both the practice and the competition robot.

The competition bot is far ahead.  We ended tonight’s meeting ready to hand it off to the programmers except for a few wires and some last minute labeling. The picture below was what we got from fitting in some of the circuit breakers for the power distribution board and messing them around to see if one of the build guys noticed… He did.  From our point of view, he passes our test of attention to detail.

On the other side, the practice bot started getting wired and the chassis got some of its pneumatics re-adjusted. For any of you wondering out there, we are using pneumatics to run the tipper, shifting gears and possibly something related to changing the angle of our hood for the shooter (which will change the angle at which we shoot). This is something we still need to determine, as what we have built right now does not have the option of adjusting the hood.

Other exciting news includes this Saturday and Sunday which will be an open field day for other teams to come  to Aviation and test their robots.  About 6 teams are coming this year and I am excited to get to see some of the designs these teams made. Sometimes it is kind of shocking to realize the many ways a task can be completed.  Also, a really cool thing for us is that we are getting our practice shirts on Sunday for this year’s game and then Liam and I will be able to post a picture of the shirts

On another note, I am also excited about how tomorrow we will be water jetting the tipper at OMAX  and possibly a few other parts. In the meantime, at AHS we will have a crew of students staying after school to help set up the gym to accommodate the teams coming on Saturday.

Well, that is it for today. Thanks for sticking around!

Camila