Debugging the Practice Bot

The critical decision to extend the meeting an hour was needed. We had about as many triumphs as struggles tonight and the days to ship can be counted on one hand *Counting tomorrow, which we won’t be meeting on!*

The Raptor Claw assembly is finally complete. We now have the pusher frame mounted and riveted, the scissor lift works (at least by hand). We have yet to power this with air though. Anyways, with this completed, we were then able to mount it on the robot. It’s all coming together.

With most of the critical features on, we took another total weight. We are at 105lbs with the current practice bot. The final design should be a little lighter, because of a few different things, mainly the lighter lift. Speaking of which, below are two pictures of the final drive and final lift, in their current states:

Now here are a few pictures of the whole thing (The practice robot), after weighing:

The main struggle of tonight was finding out that the lift, in it’s position at the time wasn’t in it’s initial lowest position. This meant that we needed to move the improperly placed solenoids and change some of the pneumatic set up. It took a decent amount of time from the meeting, just to fix placement, then to fix the rollers/roping on the lift. With the lift no longer limited by mechanical stops, or obstructed by electrical or pneumatic fixtures, we had a robot, which is almost entirely the programmer’s now.

Speaking of which, the programmers have a rough job this year. We sought out a simple design, a simple drive-base, simple height raising mechanism and hopefully a simple gripper. As Mr. Steele and Ken said tonight, this may easily be the most complex machine we have ever made (However, it may also be one of our finest, assuming we get it running). Thomas has his hands full at the moment as the Programming lead. With our old mentor gone from the team, he has a lot on his hands and I wanted to point out that getting 8+ Motors, 8+ Pneumatic Pistons, a gear shifting drive-base and other features to work in unison is no small feat! Here’s a shot of him debugging his code last night, as we interrupted his time with the robot:

Two more conjoined things to bring up:

1) Our tubes are taking damage, we really need to take care of them, below are two pieces I saw deflated tonight and we have one more in the shop (A triangle). Hopefully some of the other teams can bring a few!

2) Tomorrow we don’t have a meeting, but we want to finish a few things and beautify the field for Saturday as we are expecting company. If you are reading this post and are free tomorrow after school, the more hands we have down in the gym, the quicker we can get things done. Thanks for the help Skunks!

Also, don’t forget: We are working all day Saturday and Sunday, on Monday night from 6-8 is the unveiling/ice cream ceremony, then we ship Tuesday!

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!