2014/2015 Team Members

11/17/14 - Programming and Promoting

Today we reached a huge checkmark in robot construction. We were able to start programming and testing some of our robot mechanisms today. We first programmed our drive and then the mast raising and lowering. Realizing the deadline for the Promote award was very soon, we split into groups, one continued working on the robot and the other started working on our Promote Award. We assigned parts to everyone and quickly started on a script. We’ve got to get filming fast to get the final cut done in time for our competition in December.

11/6/14 - Neatness is Key to a Robot’s Success

Our Robotics room received a proper cleaning today. The team organized 3 boxes of nuts, bolts, Allen wrenches, drill bits, taps and an assortment of other things. The room is now neatly organized…well our toolbox is. We drilled and tapped holes our 3D printed parts for our linear slides today as well. When that was done, we attached them to the robot and attached our linear slides. We strung them up and noticed something that was not going to work. The drive belt was jumping on the pulley and the teeth of the string were getting caught into each other. The slide would not go up and down and it would fry the motor. We plan to work on that the next few meetings.

10/23/14 Drive Base and a 3D printer

Today we started constructing this year’s drive base. We reconfigured last year’s robot wheels to get rid of the omni wheels on front so that we could use it properly for drive practice. We also found out about the EKOCYCLE Cube 3D Printer Program through FIRST. We applied and hoped for the best to come. With the new 3D printer we can print out our own custom made parts for our robot’s design rather than relying on our sponsors 3D printer.

10/6/14 - Starting CAD

In today’s meeting we agreed on a robot design. We decided on a box pivoting at the center would be the most effective for scoring balls in the tubes. Our pickup will be a simple beater bar with zip-ties to pick up the balls. We began to CAD our robot design, after first downloading the correct Tetrix parts we needed. We noticed the robot was crowded in the front and had lots of space in the back (but that will be needed for a mechanism to drag a goal around with us).

9/15/14 - Prototyping Monday!

During our meeting, we brainstormed ideas that would be suitable for this year’s game. We brainstormed with a numerous amount of robot designs that we thought were good. We made a ranking system and after judging the robot designs we had 4 good ideas. We liked number 4 best, but started prototyping idea number 5 and number 9 to see if they were possible. Ultimately, we went with number 4 with modifications based on what we learned from prototyping.

9/9/14 - Day One!

We reviewed the rules and went over game play, along with driving off the ramp, knocking over the kickstands , scoring in the center goals , scoring the biggest balls first, pull the goals with us when we’re scoring, pushing the goals on the ramps and on the parking zone. We went over how many points we would get scoring in the 30, 60 and 90 centimeter goals.