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Re: how far have you gotten on your robot?
Well our team is on schedule compared to usual. First week is spent deciding what we want our robot to do. Second week is spent working on brainstorming. Third-fourth week is spent on designing the robot and machining parts at the same time. Fifth week is spent finishing building the robot. And finally the last week is tweaking the robot and practicing.
By the looks of it this year we’re going to have one crazy robot. We plan on being able to shoot a ball from our robot about every half second (can’t tell you how just yet but wait and see). The robot should have good pushing potential but were looking to just be able to maneuver around them and just unload our robot as fast as possible. The ramp is an obstacle we’re not looking forward to. I don’t know how many teams out there would agree with me but we think the ramp isn’t that important. We don’t have a name for the robot yet this year but people are thinking about naming it Gemini (hint hint) although a few people would like it to be called “Kachunk Chunk” or “Spinning Blades of Doom”.
But right now were going over a lot of calculations to make sure our robot will do exactly what we want it to do. We figure that if we spend two weeks designing the robot and looking over everything three or four times before we build then we shouldn’t have to do much work later.
We did do a prototype so see how accuracy is affected by certain variables. The shooter threw the ball about a dismal 3 feet but that’s all we needed. We also made a machine to help us decide on what material to use for our belting in the conveyor system, we have hope for the material you use to hold down rugs to hardwood floors (works very good and is pretty durable). Nothing is set in stone except for our overall design, no specifics yet but we’re almost there.
Overall our robot is shaping up. I have high hopes for this one. This should be a very interesting game, were going to need to change the battery after every match. That camera sucks up so much power, and with all these motors running our battery should have some fun. Until I can release more details, this is it for now.
Good luck to all teams!
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