How many are going to add a scaling mechanism after week 1??

[Kevin Sevcik]

Originally Posted by Chris is me

Understand that after-ship scaling mechanisms are unusually difficult to build as you are building a mechanism that supports the entire weight of your robot and is relatively difficult to align / use. Be sure you put lots of thought into how things on your robot are mounted.

That said, it's certainly doable and I would expect any team serious about iteration to be looking into it. 118's solution is novel yet difficult to implement. Tape measure solutions are also harder than they look.

We think we've found a novel solution to extending the tape measure, which seems to be the most finicky part of a tape measure lift. You can't just reverse the spool the tape is wound on because it unspools itself instead of extending. We were resigned to a second motor driving a rubber wheel to pull the tape off the spool. To simplify things, we used a banebots green wheel and pressed it against our main spool with enough compression to ensure it could pull the tape all the way to the bottom. Running things without the extra motor just to test them, we discovered we didn't even need it. The compression from the BB wheel makes the layers of tape stick to each other all the way down to the bottom, so now torque from the spool transfers up the stack to push the top layer out without any unspooling. Our system now consists of a the main spool driven by 2 CIMs through a gearbox, the undriven green BB "tensioner", and a servo to tilt the tape up and down to set the hook.

[Hitchhiker 42]

We're planning on doing a climber. We're probably going with a tape measure climber, which we have 5 weeks to build until week 6. Let's hope it works!

We're doing this because at Waterbury so few robots (only 2064 as far I saw) scaled, and it made them top choices for alliances. Also the extra 10 points over challenging is often enough to tip the balance from one alliance to another. Many games were within a 5 point range.