Saturday before St. Louis

Hello All,

Today we didn’t have a meeting, but we did yesterday, so I thought it nice to update you on our activities as of yesterday.

First of all, we learned who we are traveling with to St. Louis. I think there are a total of about 35 people flying with mentors included, 23 or so are students and the team itself is flying in two groups.

Back in the shop and gym, we worked on mounting the “pokey-stick”. Since most of our tools are in the shop but the robot is in the gym we have a scooter to facilitate movement back and forth across the school… quite the excuse to ride a scooter right? 😉 Anyway, back to the pokey stick, it turns out that when installed it clears the tipper! I know it sounds silly but when you are building there is this suspense to whether things will work exactly how designed, and when they do, there is cheering. =)

On another note, the practice bot is looking pretty good now as far as shooting. There is a very intelligent retired systems engineer in Chief Delphi  (Ether) who talked about the method he refers to as a “bang-bang control” to replace the PID that we have been using to stabilize the shooter wheel. With this method instead of oscillating around the goal and correcting it like the PID has been doing, we can turn the motors on only until we are very close or at the desired shooter wheel speed and switch them off otherwise to keep the rpms of the shooter pretty much constant.  We are excited for this new method as it seems to be working swimmingly so far.

On another aspect of robotics, Systems Integration also directed a scouting meeting in which we discussed the importance of collecting data during championship. In case that you are not aware, we scout to figure out possible partners on the field if we make it to the top 8 in our division. It turns out that our ability to scout will be even more valuable this time than it has been previous times this year and more challenging, since the championship has 400 robots and around 100 of those robots are in our division.

Finally, you might remember my comment on the Frontiers photographers coming to AHS. They did come, and our robot along with a few students posed for the camera.

Thank you for sticking around and don’t forget to…

Stay Smelly!

Camila

PS: We practiced triple balancing too, leaving 60 inches of board for other robots to balance on.

Scouting Ahead

Tonight I don’t have much to share with you about progress. If I did so, my pictures would be very similar to last night and my articles would be rather drab. So instead, I am going to focus on a few different design features and showcase several current projects.

This one goes out to you Kyle, if you are reading. Here is this year’s current scouting sheet prepared by Danny. Feedback is always appreciated and I’m sure Kyle will have a word or two 🙂

For those of you who don’t know, this sheet is mass produced. We then have scouts from our team in the stands at competition watching every robot in every single match. Those scouts are then responsible for keeping track of robot capabilities and performance, in order for us to rank our opposition. This is highly useful when it comes to the elimination matches, as we may be picking teams to join our alliance!

Tonight the Inner Gripper model was finalized (again). Welcome to the design process… With these designs completed for our end effectors, the crew in the shop cut the aluminum box-tubing which will become the frames for these sub-assemblies. It certainly appears as if we can get started putting them together this weekend!

Here is another key element on the robot which I haven’t focused on much in my articles, the lift. Here is a render of the Double Chain Reduction Lift Drive Assembly. (A mouthful, eh?)

The lift itself is made up of 3 separate stages which extend out like a ladder, allowing us to reach the top peg’s height of 122″ off the ground (over 10 FEET!). In the render above, you might notice a rather large disk with intricate paisley looking cut-outs. That disk is our brake. If you notice on the left side of the brake, that funny shaped part hugging it is a Disc Brake Caliper. These two parts interact, just as your car does. The pneumatically operated caliper squeezes the disc, which is spinning, in order to slow the lift down to a stop. With the capability to lift in 2 seconds and the possible need to stay elevated for periods of time, this will be a nice feature.

So, I lied. I didn’t get you the picture of how this year’s shirt is going to look. It’s probably best I didn’t, because it’s had some major changes done to it. Let’s just say the skunk has all the game pieces around him and it’s certainly colorful. I’ll be happy to unveil the concept to you tomorrow night! (If the P.R. team will let me disclose it.)

One last thing, I’ve heard many people asking about specific dates for upcoming events. I’m not positive about this year’s Unveiling/Ship Party date. However, it sounds like it will probably be on the 21st. Stay tuned, I’ll keep you posted. Here’s what I do know:

Seattle Regionals (we’re on the Cascade Field at Qwest Field Event Center): March 17th-19th

Autodesk Oregon Regional (Portland Memorial Coliseum): March 24th-26th

World Championships (St. Louis): April 27th-30th

When the time comes, I will make sure that I post links to where you can watch the competitions live from home. Week 4 is upon us, GULP!

Design Crisis

Tonight we had our first “stand-up” meeting in a while. I felt that it was relatively short and informative. Glad we’re keeping it that way. It’s good to know what’s going on as long as it’s concise! Work was to be done and we hopped to it.

For the ensuing hour, the design team did a review on the end-effectors. We have incorporated a scissor-lift pusher plate to quickly remove the game piece from both the “Bunny Hook” and “Inner Gripper”. We will be working on the actual assemblies this weekend, so we are making sure that the designs are ready to be produced. I will post snapshots and do a more detailed design review with you (my readers, tomorrow).

Speaking of which, I am shocked as to how many hits/views we are getting. Not limited to our own team in fact. We are currently at almost 400 views! With that in mind, I want to take this time to ask you, the reader, what you want to hear/see more of. Simply comment at the bottom of this page and I’ll get back to you ASAP. Thanks for the input. This blog is meant for you!

Things are going swimmingly in the shop. The lift and arm can be seen below in it’s current state. More pieces will arrive tomorrow, but it’s getting there.

The second base frame is  done and the first now has the Andy Mark supershifters and 4 of the 6 wheels in it.

The field team has a side of the racks set up in the gym. I’ll get you some pictures tomorrow. We were lucky to visit the shop tonight as the design issues are at hand. We saw them hard at work, you can see the second tower in the picture!

Deployment team showed off new and varying prototypes. We hate to push it down the line, but it will have to wait at least until tomorrow.

The electrical/pneumatics team got the design team a rough weight. We thought we were on the light side, oh how it adds up…

Danny is done with the scouting sheet v1, it looks great and the shirts for the season have some intrigueing designs too. Both of these are on my agenda for tomorrow, photo wise.

One last thing, another thanks goes out to my friend and manager Olivia. She continues to edit my work and provide me with feedback and support. I couldn’t do it without her. She seems to appreicate my terrible puns, no matter how p-unbearable they get ❤

See you tomorrow!

Surprise Shipment

I was on standby for Omax last night, unfortunately to no avail. However, this morning we were back on track to cut! Ken made it down there to start at 5 am. When he returned to school, he had with him the components for the second drive base frame, the lift and the arm. The lift as I spoke of yesterday was being welded.

With all of these shiny new toys at our disposal, we spent yet another Saturday hard at work. The drive team split, one group focused on pop-riveting the second frame, while the other group worked on the guts (wheels, chain, all that good stuff) for the first. Anyways, issues with Andy Mark’s wheel assemblies are providing setbacks, but no worries, we’ll pick up the pace and get the drive base ready!

This might be a good time to note, if you were not already aware (my bad), we are building TWO ENTIRE robots this year! 🙂

As for the Lift, with the new weldment picture frames here, we were certainly uplifted. Lift team members spent their time rising to the challenge of putting the assemblies together, this is also going to be an ongoing task. 🙂

As for the End Effectors, we now have all the design models prepared and the remaining CAD members are back into the old routine. Focusing on the model for submission is the next priority to this sub-team. Until parts are completed for those sub-assemblies, we’ll be working on our entire robot model. Also, exciting CAD news, we finally got Vault!

Electrical/Programming got the Ultrasonic sensor working and developed a pseudo-bumper for the practice robot.

What I hear from the systems kids is that the submission documents are getting a nice overhaul/update. Danny has iteration one of the scouting sheet pretty much set and Drew is busy filling in the holes of our past. SPEAKING OF WHICH: If you have any pictures from previous outreach events, please get them to him, along with info!

That’s about it, hope I’m not missing too much, I’ll do some patchwork on Monday, I’ll hopefully have more to report on!