Update: Here is a video taken by the OC Register (the reporter states 3 weeks but it really was 13 days, we've even considered naming the robot 13 days......) http://www.ocregister.com/video/inde...= 13520246001
Yea, you heard that right, we had 13 days of building. Day 1 on the 4th of February we opened the kit and started assembling the kitbot base. And today (Tuesday) at 3am in the morning we called it finished!
It is by no means like most robots seen here, and we still need to do some stuff with our allowed 40 pounds at the practice day. However, it functions how we want it to, and it isn't the pusher that some people had planned for us.
Honestly, I'm amazed we were able to pull it off. We only had a core of 4-5 students (including myself) who showed up on a regular basis, and from what I've seen here, that is a much lower workforce than most teams.
We'll have a video up soon, but pictures will suffice for now. It is a dumper, although it's hard to tell from the pictures. A pneumatic cylinder pushes the hopper base up and opens a gate from a pivot system to allow the balls to fall out. However, at rest position when collecting balls, the gate it completely closed, so we can stack quite a few in the hopper. We don't know how many, because we only had 1 to work with.
It would have been better if we made the robot width wise and not length wise, but we were building the base from kitbot instructions before we even had a complete design yet, haha.
But again, this is our very first year in FIRST, so I don't think it's too bad of an attempt, haha.
Here are some pictures....
