All right, here's your update! It's only about a day late.
The robot is now drivable. We build the Kit of Parts chassis, but decided to use all omni wheels in lieu of the standard ones, to give a better and more even turning radius. This seems to be working well, with the one exception of the fact that drifts a lot and is slow to stop on waxed floors. But fortunately, our robot shouldn't have to be up on the HDPE very often, and it works well on carpet, so everything seems okay so far.
I'm quite happy that this electrical board won't be the final board that we use, as everything seems to be held in place with exclusively zip ties. I tried to count the zip ties used on the board, but lost track at about 12,668 zip ties. I have no doubt that at least 13,000 were used. Unfortunately, the battery was also held on by zip ties, and thus it sheared them off when the robot crashed into a wall really hard. This is, I believe, the third year when the first thing that we did after creating a chassis was drive it into a wall. Fortunately, the electronics were so thoroughly encased in their zip-ties that nothing was broken or even really budged when the battery slid across the top of the electrical board.
I don't know about our team, sometimes.
We've decided to make the forklift proper out of parts of the VEX chassis. This will provide a solid foundation, and more importantly, it will look really cool. We're going to consider placing Glorified Blocks
(TM) on the ends of the forklift, that would be a way of passively picking up garbage bins, as the clips won't quite do the trick.
One thing that's being debated at the moment is whether or not the threaded rod and motor should be located at one end of the chassis, with an arm extending to the opposite end. The forklift would still be able to slide up and down without sagging, due to the placement of some rods or pieces of 80/20 by its sides; it would have
special little buttons that would allow it to slide up and down and remain straight. While this would cause a greater strain on the threaded rod, it would keep the center of gravity in a better place, which is definitely something to consider in this year's challenge. Thoughts, anyone?
...oh, and pretty much everyone agreed that the robot should be made to look like our team mascot, a dragon.
You can see all of the progress we've made, including a video of the chassis rolling and drawings of what the thing might end up looking like, in this convenient and short video.
Here it is!
Sorry for the overload of pink... we're very proud of our 'team color' and we're not afraid to show it.
Anyways, see you in about half a week, or maybe sooner if any questions are raised! Bye for now.
-Thromgord