pic: Another Team 968 Teaser....
 

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very nice wiring job.....only one question, is all that 10 awg wire to the circuit breaker panels? (my eyes must be a little whacked, but it just seems smaller to me....), nice work again!

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I have to ask, where did you get the wire connectors for the SMC double solenoids? I had a hell of a time trying to order some more of those solenoids from a distributor (took me three times to get the correct 12VDC coils and submounts). Unfortunatly, after all was said and done, nothing ever came with those wire connectors to plug into the ends of the solenoid. Soldering works fine, but I'm curious where you found those.

Wiring looks fantastic, by the way! I just brought my wire organizer in here and told him next year, I want THAT.

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im wondering how long your bot will run on one battery...ive always been told the compresser eats the bat real quick

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You do know that you are allowed to switch the fuse on the spike for the compressor with a 20A Circuit breaker, right? I say this because if that fuse blows, with that much relying on air pressure, you'd be dead. You could probably deal with one or two other things not working, but if your compressor dies, it looks to me that your whole bot is dead.

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Our electrical team looked at this and wanted me to post about this. From their interpretation, you cannot have red, 'hot', wires going to the ground part of the spike. You need black wires. You can get DQed for it. I'd look into it more if I were you.

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that would make no sence. what the spike does is alternate which wire is hot. so lets say you have one black and one red. i fwd erd might be hot and black grnd. then in rev black is hot and red is grnd. you would need magic color changing wires to have such a thing.

i did look it up by the way and there is no regulation for the after part of the spike, seeinng as the things connected dont have defined + and - and the output switches back and forth

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Ok, thanks, that's what they said, and I'm not on electrical team. Thanks for the clear-up.

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love the family guy icon!

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MVRT describes that as "Travis Wiring"!! haha i tried to do some travis wiring this year, but its nothing close to that. Picss coming soon :p

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I am aware of the 30 amp breaker. It was temporary as we were wiring up the electronics, it will be swapped before we power anything up, thanks for pointing it out though ;)

And as for the solenoid wires, we purchased ours through motion industries. We simply gave them the part number of the solenoid valve and they told us the part number of the wire. ( if you need it I can look it up for you) They were available at almost all of their warehouses, as the wires are compatible with a lot of SMC valves.

THanks for the feedback!

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Beautiful job, just amazing. I looked at this, and my only thought was "I can't wait to see the REST of the robot!"

-dave

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Where did you get the manifold for the solonoids?
We are using four double solonoids and they are all connected by individual hoses. A manifild would be much simpler and more space efficient.

Looks incriediable!

Good luck!

-Andy

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11 cylinders!?!?! I can guess what 6 or 7 of them are for but that's about it. I cannot possibly wait another 38 hours to see this thing. But I guess I will have to. You are going to Chatsworth right?

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The solenoid manifold is available through SMC. We purchased ours through motion industries.

11 pistons... I will try to break it down in a fairly subtle manner. 2 for wings, 2 for center lift, 2 for rear lift, 2 for shifting ;), 1 for ball grabber, 2 for elev release.

That should hold you off until sunday. We might not be fully functional as we just realized that our reduction for the arm is not sufficient... so we are trying to throw together a quick solution before sunday. See you then.

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Wings?!? You must be FLYING up to the bar. :D I have a fairly good idea of what the wings and shifters are, I think the rear lift either helps you turn or helps you get up the stair or lifts up the robot then sets it on the lip of the goal or mayeb a combination of these things. The center lift must lift the robot off the ground. I kind of figured one will be for a ball grabber. But I have no idea what the 2 pistons labled "elev relaease" are. Perhaps they bring an arm up to the height of the bar. I really want to see this thing sitting on the scale. With 10 20P gears (I assume) and 11 cylinders, and of course sprockets and chains for driving and linking for 4wd, and all the stuff actuated by these cylinders, I really don't know how you guys do it. I see couple "future Andy Bakers" here on these boards, guess who one of them is. ;)

Perhaps you are only shifting either only the drills or only the chias, but I have a feeling it will be both. Perhaps there will be no other motors than the ones driving, that I see as being possible. But how will you have enough air for 11 cylinders? I know two are small for the shifters but still, 9 cylinders? We don't even have as much air as we'd like for our 1 cylinder.

EDIT: I hope you and I will meet up at Chatsworth and have a long discussion about your marvel of a machine.

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*tear*

it's just...so...beautiful...

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Oh wow, I have seen the entire robot in pictures and wow haha it JUST looks amazing;) haha its the combinations of many good robots in the past. Travis i hope that didnt reveal THAT much:-p

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What pictures are those? ;) Don't go spoiling toooooo many secrets now Akshay.

As for the motors, lets just say we only have 5 speed controllers.

Unfortunately, as pretty as it is, we are running into design flaw after design flaw with this thing. The arm is becoming a problem, and the "elev...." hasn't risen yet.

With two sleepless nights we might just have it done and working for chatsworth.I will also guarantee that it won't tip over this time (let alone twicw!).

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Holy heck of a wiring job!! Man, if the rest of your robot is that neat, I hope you've got room on your trophy shelf for a Quality Award!! :)

Nice job!

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We put a giant garage door spring on our arm so that we wouldn't have to have a huge reduction so it could move quickly, and hold its place without stalling the motor against the load.

It works really well. We only used about 1 foot of spring (before we stretched it) and it isn't that heavy.

We talked to an inspector yesterday and he didn't say anything about it. Just to be safe, we ran a steel cable through the middle and anchored it so that if some mutant witha chainsaw attacks out bot, the spring will not fly off and kill anything.

pic:


You can see, the globe motor with a 1:12 reduction off the gearbox is capable of lifting the arm when its fully extended and has a 10 pound weight on the far end (we used a concrete drill to approximate the weight of ball+claw).

However, to be nice to the motor (and because it was too quick to control well) we have since removed that little sprocket at the top and replaced it wil a big 80 tooth sprocket, which we used the drillpress and a 3in holesaw, with a 1 1/8 in holesaw to do touch up work. It looks cooler, and the arm is much happier.

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[quote=11 pistons... I will try to break it down in a fairly subtle manner. 2 for wings, 2 for center lift, 2 for rear lift, 2 for shifting ;), 1 for ball grabber, 2 for elev release.[/QUOTE]

i have some expiriance with "shifting" in the transmition. our robot from last year shifted gears with two 2 stroke pistons. there was just one problem, we had alot of truble shifting from high to low and from low to high. the pistons pushed the gears back and forth just enough to mesh with the high and low gear. the problem we had was the gears wouldn't mesh, they would just hit into each other and spinn. this made the loudest sound 'cause the teethe of the gears would be rubbing up against eachother making the high pitched sound. i just wanted to know how you guys were shifting and if you had that problem. if you did have that problem, how did u solve it. my team eventualy solved it. we bought a sec of micro files and started fileing away at the gaps inbetween the teeth to make them mesh easier (dave lavery told us to do that one) but it still never worked rite.


by the way...i wish my team can wire like that...its amazing, it make me want to cry :D

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[quote=some young guy]The more succesful pneumatic shifting trannys don't actually slide gears back and forth -- this is problematics for exactly the reason you just described. Look at the Technokat's 2003 tranny for an example of how to build a shift on the fly tranny (i'm sure there are others, but our bot was involved in an unhealthy (at least for our bot) relationship with the Technokat's bot, so I remember theirs the most). Instead ofmoving gears, they moved a dog which basically selected which gear (the one for high gear or the one for low gear) was locked to the driveshaft, allowing the gear that wasn't in use to slide on the driveshaft. They used a dog, three massive prongs on each side, slightly angled, that mated with three depressions on each gear. Neither gear was locked to the shaft, but the dog was, so by engaging the dog with the gear they wanted they locked that gear to the shaft allowing the other to just spin.

I'm not sure how clear that was, go look up pics from last year for a better idea.

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It doesnt mesh gears. It is a modified technokat tranny. (here is your hint) If technokats used 1 piston for 2 speeds.......Take a guess. As much as I would love to upload the pictures, my team has still not given me permission to do so ;)

I also want to apologize to those teams expecting to see our robot at chatsworth today. We were working on some final details and ran into some problems. We decided we really needed to get it working properly before any real 'testing' happened.

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holy smokes!!!! thats wonderfull!!! makes my electronics look like cow dung

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I still don't understand how the f*** you put all those solenoids so close and had the outputs come out the bottom. :confused: Please enlighten me.

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Easy tiger. It's an SMC solenoid manifold. It has a single pressure input, 4 exhausts, and 8 stations to mount the solenoids to (you can get them in 2-XXX port configurations). All of the A & B pressure ports that go to the pneumatic pistons are on the right side of it stacked on top of eachother. It saves space by using a common pressure input and common exhausts.

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Looks like we're not the only team that discovered that thing this year.

It helps a lot, especially with all the cylinders teams are using this year.

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Did team 60 use the same manifold? Also, Jay, how is it that you are using 8 solenoids? Are you using a pwm output for a relay? (assuming you are using 8 solenoids and the compressor, that would equate to 9 relays/relay outputs from the controller.) Tell me the secret!