2478 presents: "The Crimson Chain" (Video)

[michael.saxon]

Robot reveal video for our Aerial Assist Robot, The Crimson Chain. We were at Arizona and we will be at Vegas!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6ylxc-3lY0

We restarted team 2478 this year at "inner city" Westwood High School. We have six veteran members and 30 rookies. We're all pretty proud of our:

-Automated Variable Tension system
-30 foot truss pass shots
-High goals from truss
-Fast and effective pickup
-West Coast Drive
-Sensor Integration

Enjoy!

[nuclearnerd]

Looks great! I love the amount of engineering that went into the leadscrew tensioner and latch. Hopefully your reset time isn't too bothersome . Good luck!

[michael.saxon]

Our tensioner was a little slow for us at Arizona so we switched out the acme rod from 5 turns per inch to 2 turns per inch. Now it takes about 3 seconds to get from top to bottom, instead of the 8ish we had before.

[nuclearnerd]

Wow. Great improvement! Good luck in Las Vegas.

[n1ckd2012]

Love the tensioner!

[JamesCH95]

I really like that your catapult doesn't need a hard stop.

[Mason987]

This robot is awesome. It's very thorough, intricate, and innovative. Not once during build season did an idea like this cross my mind. It was good playing with you guys in Vegas! Awesome drive team, too!

[Marcia Roberts]

We made some changes for championship! Worked on our auton, added flaps, lights, and a slight change in our controllers!

[CENTURION]

Put me on the "love the tensioner" bandwagon.

Do you have presets for different tension amounts to facilitate different types of shots?

[Marcia Roberts]

Yes we do

[Gregor]

I absolutely love your variable tension, and how you just loosen it all the way to "winch" back.

How do you avoid backdriving the variable tensioner?

[michael.saxon]

Originally Posted by CENTURION

Put me on the "love the tensioner" bandwagon.

Do you have presets for different tension amounts to facilitate different types of shots?

Thanks for the compliment!

We are *capable* of doing lots of different shot ranges, but we still strongly prefer specific ranges that have the highest accuracy. We have 4 presets to choose from, some for trussing and passing, others for scoring.

Originally Posted by Gregor

I absolutely love your variable tension, and how you just loosen it all the way to "winch" back.

How do you avoid backdriving the variable tensioner?

We have limit switches on the top and bottom of the mechanism that serve as the last line of defense, but we use two potentiometers to move to the preset positions, so we'll never run against the bottom limit unless both pots fail.

[JamesCH95]

Pretty sure the anti-back-drive feature is simply through virtue of using a lead screw, which inherently doesn't back-drive.

[CENTURION]

Originally Posted by JamesCH95

Pretty sure the anti-back-drive feature is simply through virtue of using a lead screw, which inherently doesn't back-drive.

Yeah, driving them past their limits is the bigger danger.

We tried a leadscrew climber last year, and someone put untested autonomous code on the field during our last practice match thursday. Well, the CIM went backwards instead of forwards, and so the screw went down instead of up, and it basically tore itself and a large portion of the robot apart.