Our battery box mount that will be facing up when we are on the pyramid. Good work Figley!
Feb 18 (T-1 Day)
Robot weighed 45 lbs as of Saturday! He’s still lacking electronics, climber, and pneumatics.
Feb 11 (T-8 Days)
The Programmer’s Apprentice
Hey everyone! I’m Akshay, a programmer-in-training under the great mentor Arjun Namineni.
Programming is some pretty serious business. No matter how amazing of a job our build team does on the robot, it’ll be all but useless if we can’t get it to move around! Of course, this may sound easy. But as you all must know, getting a computer to do what you want it to do doesn’t always work out. A lot of factors come into play when programming a robot as complex and versatile as the ones we use in FIRST competitions, so it takes plenty of practice to get things going your way.
Hopefully, with some time, I can get much better. But for now, I’ll just be staring at “Hello world” while I try sorting out what I’ve learned in the past few weeks.
Jan 30 (T-20 Days)
Projects in Progress
- Climber CAD & Final Design
- Shooter Fabrication
- Scouting System Revisions
Other Projects in the Queue
- Climber - Order Parts, Fabricate, Assemble, Test
- Programming
- Bumpers - Design, Manufacturing, Assembly, & Mounting
- Electrical/Pneumatics - Board design, Assembly, Installation
- Driver practice
- Complete BOM
We worked at the school today, since we had a general team meeting as well, and so there are a few projects that were in progress yesterday that we had to temporarily put on hold until we are back at the GM tech center tomorrow.
Climber
We got started drawing up the final climber design (The CAD for the shooter and toaster is done but the computer gets upset if we make it load too many parts at once, so we only had the chassis loaded in this picture). Tomorrow we have to focus on finalizing the rest of the climber CAD so that we can catch any flaws, get COTS parts ordered, and get custom parts dimensioned and printed so we can work on them this weekend.
Shooter Fabrication
All of the cutting marks have been made on the shooter plates, and we began cutting them out. We’ll finish that tomorrow at GM and can begin assembly.
Scouting System
We pulled up our scouting system documents that were finished earlier in the season and added a few new features, most importantly data validation on all of our input screens. The data validation will prevent many potential errors in entering our scouting information and lead to more accurate data. Accuracy in our data is important for making informed strategic decisions during competitions.
(Pay no attention to the general team meeting going on in the background)
The climber system still has a long way to go in CAD, however the rough concept is solid, we’ve verified the viability of most of the fabrication necessary, and we’ve done calculations to determine the power necessary for the mechanisms.
Jan 30 (T-20 Days)
