I think build season is finally getting to me. Its 9 on Saturday, and I think I'm going to go to bed. FIRST things FIRST. We spent the day with our robot at the North West Robot Festival. It was really awesome getting feedback from other people, and "showing off the bot.
FIRST Team 2605 was there also. They didn't have their FRC bot, but they did have what looked like a vex bot with them that they let the crowd drive. We even teamed up on a few things.
Here their robot is putting some doughnuts on our minibot deployment tray.
Our robot did slip into demo mode which was annoying.
The shoulder problems we had been having have been fixed and seams to be working well now. We replaced the shaft that tied the right side of the arm to the sprocket with a longer one that extends out through the double bracket on the outside of the arm. (A picture would probably sum this up in half a second, and somehow I forgot to get a close up of the arm.
We did have some strange problems. The gripper solenoid valve stopped working. I think it may be jammed. The light comes on suggesting it has power. We have a spare we will replace it with and I'll blow it out with an airgun on monday. Might also be a kink in the hose...
Our arm extension mechanism also got all sorts of tangled up. The wire is getting caught in some seams in the plastic. I sort of want to come up with a better way to do this. good thing we have 5 weeks before competition.
The mini bot needs more magnets. Things were working really well back in the classroom, but when we got to the festival the minibot wheels slipped up a storm. A part of me wonders if it has to do with temperature. Maybe we should try heating up the wheels before each run...wonder how the officials would feel if we warmed up our pole before each of our matches. :-)
Tomorrow we are going to take the robot to a practice field in Lynnwood. I have the video camera in the truck already so I hope to get some good video...Course we have to fix the arm problems before we can do anything else. :-(
Still...I'm really glad we got as far as we did this year.
Edoga