pic: Team 1477 - Texas Torque - 2011

[James Tonthat]

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8OmR9yBhZw

[Akash Rastogi]

James,

It has been awesome keeping up with you the entire season. I've been waiting for the final video and I am far from disappointed. Your design/fabrication/build process is definitely something for all teams to emulate.

Congrats on your best bot yet, and best of luck at Alamo and Lone Star. Finally another Texas 'big dog'.

As RC would say, "hella nice"

[JaneYoung]

My, what long arms you have.

I just gave up my future caption contest entry.

Looks great, James. All the best to you and 1477 this season.

Jane

[thefro526]

Hehe, looks familiar.

Awesome bot, hope it does well at Alamo.

[Chris is me]

Fantastic job. I love the drop drive and the arm joint.

Thanks for all the help this year.

[Joe G.]

Nice robot!

Am I correct that the drop-down drive switches between "long" 4wd and drop center 6 wheel drive for added turning ability? Very cool idea! I may have to borrow it sometime

[JVN]

VERY clean design. Should be extremely effective, especially after you beat up that practice robot for a few weeks.

I LOVE love love love the drivetrain. I'm excited to see how it works -- especially because this has been on my list of "things to prototype" since last summer. I think it will serve you extremely well.

The sheet metal work is beautiful -- 148 is going to need to step it up next year if we want to keep up!

I'll be sure to stop by on Thursday for the full tour.

-John

PS - Man it looks like everyone is bringing their a-game this year! San Antonio should be a heck of a brawl!

[JVN]

Originally Posted by JVN

VERY clean design. Should be extremely effective, especially after you beat up that practice robot for a few weeks.

I LOVE love love love the drivetrain. I'm excited to see how it works -- especially because this has been on my list of "things to prototype" since last summer. I think it will serve you extremely well.

The sheet metal work is beautiful -- 148 is going to need to step it up next year if we want to keep up!

I'll be sure to stop by on Thursday for the full tour.

-John

PS - Man it looks like everyone is bringing their a-game this year! San Antonio should be a heck of a brawl!

BTW - Which wrist joint did you end up using? Looks like you went through some iterations on that piece.

[Akash Rastogi]

I didn't get to see the latest iteration of your gripper before the video, what and why did you change the design from what I saw at 2791's workshop?

[Chris is me]

Originally Posted by Akash Rastogi

I didn't get to see the latest iteration of your gripper before the video, what and why did you change the design from what I saw at 2791's workshop?

The prototype 1477 sent us was meant to be more of a test bed than a final product. It weighed over 8 pounds and was designed so that the "top" of the roller claw would be adjustable for different compression levels. They used the lessons they learned from that claw to build another, much lighter iteration. We also passed along some compression and depth numbers we determined using Vex.

[Mike Soukup]

Originally Posted by JVN

I LOVE love love love the drivetrain. I'm excited to see how it works -- especially because this has been on my list of "things to prototype" since last summer. I think it will serve you extremely well.

This isn't a snide remark, but an honest question. What's special about the drivetrain? It looks like a standard 6wd to me.

[Aren_Hill]

It has pneumatic cylinders on one end that drop down that wheel set picking up the middle set, making it a longways oriented 4wd and near impossible to turn.

[R.C.]

This is hella nice

Can't wait to see you guys compete. Good Luck guys!

-RC

[sdcantrell56]

Love the simplicity. This is a seriously clean design. Look forward to playing with you guys at Alamo

[James Tonthat]

Wow, thanks for all the compliments! I need to give a lot of credit to our audio/video/programming mentor, Rayne Beridon, for getting all the video and putting it all together, I gave him a pretty hard time and some crazy deadlines but I think it came together pretty well. He's spent a lot of time getting the footage and I gave him a pretty quick deadline, the video isn't super polished but I think it's great.

Akash - I think we're very happy with our build process. It takes a lot of resources and planning but as it says in your signature "Never, NEVER stop striving to increase that output, and increase your inputs." Also, some pictures of our roller claw (keep in mind, this is our practice bot so it's not as well kept as our competition bot.) This version is smaller and lighter, and uses only one motor. This version is actually our third sheetmetal version, and I think we'll be doing at minimum one more revision before Lone Star.





Jane - Heh, good luck to you and 418 this year. I look forward to see you guys in San Antonio a couple days from now.

Dustin - Thanks for all the help you given us, good luck!

Chris - Thanks for the feedback you've given us, looks like you'll have a great robot, best of luck to you and your team.

Joe - Yeah, the drop drive is pretty useful since we're anticipating some pushing matches and some pretty good defense this year. We aren't sure how the game is going to play out but I think we'll have some use for it. It was really easy for us to implement once we had all the parts and we've had no trouble with it (but we still iterated just in case), definitely gave us a lot smiles when it all came together.

John - I think we learned a lot from having two good revisions of the robot. I can't say we've had a competition's worth experience with the drivetrain but we like it so far. We took a lot of inspiration from your 2007 robot and built up from there. The pneumatic mounting for the wrist looks a bit awkward but it gives us the geometry we want and I think we'll be finding some more functionality for it soon . I'd like to thank you and 148 for all the help and inspiration for us the last couple years.

Mike - Aren's reply is correct, we wanted a unturnable capability that would allow us to move in a straight line with relative ease.

Aren - Good luck to 1625!

RC - Thanks, good luck to you guys as well.

Sean - Look forward to seeing you in San Antonio, good luck to you guys.

Bit of behind the scenes: We've been fortunate enough to have another sheetmetal sponsor, Nema Enclosures, join us this year. They've been great to us, we get CAD'd parts sent in Wednesday, we pick up finished powdercoated parts Saturday. This has allowed us to do a couple iterations on a couple major systems. On the practice bot we were able to strip it down to two of the original chassis pieces and rebuild it from the ground up with the latest revision of the parts (giving us twin robots Jacob and Sheila.) Again, Nema Enclosures have been AMAZING to us. Chris mentioned our prototype claw, we had had two sets of our testbed roller claw made and sent one set to 2791. We used their feedback to improve our design to reduce weight, tweak our level of pinch, and reduce size.

On iteration:
Roller claw - 3rd sheetmetal iteration (we've built 80/20 ones)
Drive gearboxes - 3rd iteration
Drive chassis - 2nd iteration
Tower - 2nd iteration
Tower supports - 2nd iteration
Arm gearbox - 3rd iteration
Wrist joint - 2nd iteration