FRC 95, The Grasshoppers, Build Thread

[JamesCH95]

Super-duper late start this year, but here we are!

We took a more 'main stream' approach this year than in many past years, but of course we had to make a few things a bit different.

Chassis is our normal plate-spacer-sheet metal construction with live axles connecting 10 6in wheels (colson for now, pneumatic maybe later... if we ever get them!) 6 CIMs geared for 10.4ft/s (ish) single-speed with WCP gearboxes.

Our main mechanism is a shoulder-mounted shooter/intake combo with two stages of belts/pulleys and rollers. The shooter is powered by 4x 775 pros, and the shoulder is controlled with 2x mini-cims.

Almost everything will have encoder feedback. An ardupilot will assist with navigation, and an Axis camera will assist with vision processing and/or manual aiming.

Firstly, here is a CAD cap of our 2016 robot: Kovaka



(I don't have a lot of great piece-part mfg steps, apologies)

Here is the plasma-cut blank of our belly-pan.



We then bent that in-house into the crazy belly pan shape for our chassis.



And have started to build the shoulder rail assembly, which is a major structural element in the chassis. Although the chassis is (on purpose) a bit flexible to give us a little pseudo-suspension.



I will try to get a few shooter pictures and other layout pictures tonight.

I have left our numerous details and design choices, but feel free to ask if anything piques your interest.