how far have you gotten on your robot?

[santosh]

Our drivetreain design deadline is wednesday but I hear that we will be done by tomorrow and order parts by tomorrow and starting builing the drivetrain by wednesday.

[binary_sandman]

we have finsih protype start build monday have finished
with driver programing and auton which only took us about 4 hours

[gondorf]

actually our robot was upside down and we were staring at it dumbfounded.

the motor was plugged in but the gear that it was attached to was stuck

and during all this i thought: dont those look like the cookies i put in the oven before school...the oven is still on...oh no!!!

[greencactus3]

we opened up our boxes and took otu everything... and then pulled out cardboard and had an arts and crafts show. then played marioparty2 and then back to inventor.

[JBotAlan]

Originally Posted by gondorf

i remember the vex robots last year. my schools vex robot blew up and part of the team had scratches and burns.

remember to wear your safety glasses

just had to say that

I watched a teammate last year shatter a Dremel bit and it literally threw shrapnel that bounced off his safety glasses...needless to say he held onto his goggles a little tighter after that encounter...

68 has a few prototypes working. We're still testing different ideas, though. Hopefully by the end of this week or next we will have settled on a design.

And no, we're not using the kitbot.

JBotAlan

[gondorf]

Originally Posted by JBotAlan

I watched a teammate last year shatter a Dremel bit and it literally threw shrapnel that bounced off his safety glasses...needless to say he held onto his goggles a little tighter after that encounter...

68 has a few prototypes working. We're still testing different ideas, though. Hopefully by the end of this week or next we will have settled on a design.

And no, we're not using the kitbot.

JBotAlan

as far as that goes i have a couple of questions that is probably cause im a rookie.

1. What is a dremel bit?
2. how do they shatter?
3. if it shattered why did it "throw" shrapnel? it should have dropped.
4. why did it only hit his goggles?

[Andrew Blair]

A dremel bit is a bit for a small tool that spins at extremely high RPM. Good for grinding, cutting, etc.
http://images.google.com/images?q=tb...20mototool.jpg

Now, when a small, hardened tool breaks for some reason, it still contains a lot of energy. When it breaks, it shatters, and pieces, with lots of rotational energy, fly outwards, kind of like a sharp explosion. Little bits of shrapnel. When you use a dremel, you often end up putting your face quite close to the work, so when a bit shatters, it sprays stuff all over your face, including you safety glasses. I'm sure they had lots of little cuts too, but in comparison to what could have been lost, its very minor.

[gondorf]

Originally Posted by Andrew Blair

A dremel bit is a bit for a small tool that spins at extremely high RPM. Good for grinding, cutting, etc.
http://images.google.com/images?q=tb...20mototool.jpg

Now, when a small, hardened tool breaks for some reason, it still contains a lot of energy. When it breaks, it shatters, and pieces, with lots of rotational energy, fly outwards, kind of like a sharp explosion. Little bits of shrapnel. When you use a dremel, you often end up putting your face quite close to the work, so when a bit shatters, it sprays stuff all over your face, including you safety glasses. I'm sure they had lots of little cuts too, but in comparison to what could have been lost, its very minor.

hmmm dremel looks sort of like a recipricoal saw.

anyway that is a very cool mishap even better than the picture of a whole bunch of high school students looking at a burning motor and not knowing what to do.

[Jonathan Norris]

We have finished designing, and have been prototyping for a few days now. We just started to CAD everything, and work on the drive system.

Team 949 has gone through our concepts and we are now going through the designing period.

We are planning to build a prototype launcher and the target tomorrow and by next sunday we should have everything autocadded and ready for building..

Maybe we should build the kop bot.. hmm.. other than that we haven't done anything else

[Sgraff_SRHS06]

We've also finished designing. We are just now in the final stages of prototyping and putting the finishing touches on our designs. Tomorrow we are going shopping for a good portion of the additional parts we need.

As programmer, I have no say in all of this, but I can make special interest advocacies. We finally got our Gyroscopes and our rights to the CMU Camera and the Accelerometer. The programmers, including myself, are currently writing pseudocode.

But we have made much more progress in our design than any of our teams in the past, outside of our rookie year.

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As for kitbots, we are using the kit, but we are not staying inside it. This may be the first year in which we don't use the kit wheels, though. Our drive team wants "tricks" (trick wheels) and "grips" (grip wheels). After their experiments with Deeper Thought, the decided that the kit wheels were not going to be sufficient for climbing up the hill. So, I'm not sure if the kit wheels will hold. However, the chassis will be from the kit and we'll do better weight management (so we actually have a good frame).

[Nuttyman54]

We've got the design figured out and are tweaking a few dimensions. some of the team is building a test launcher and a goal, and we've got the Kitbot build (but not running) as a test bed for the sensors.

[Alex Pelan]

The short answer: "Not nearly far enough."

We have tested some prototypes with varying levels of success and have started some design work. We haven't put the kitbot from '06 together yet because of some offseason work we have been doing involving a kitbot that we had already put together.

[Rick TYler]

We didn't like how the first one turned out, so we are buildiing a second 'bot. Aw, just kidding. The chassis team is done with their design and they are ordering parts. The game system team is having the prototype shoot-off on Tuesday, and will order parts this week. The programming/controls team is working on driver selection, functional control design, and testing the camera and other sensors. The electrical/pneumatic team is playing cards and waiting. The PR team is supposed to deliver final designs on Friday for our t-shirts, driving suits, helmets, buttons, banners, and the animation file for our blimp.

One week in, we are four weeks behind. Life's like that. From Shakespeare in Love:

Philip Henslowe: Mr. Fennyman, allow me to explain about the theatre business. The natural condition is one of insurmountable obstacles on the road to imminent disaster.
Hugh Fennyman: So what do we do?
Philip Henslowe: Nothing. Strangely enough, it all turns out well.
Hugh Fennyman: How?
Philip Henslowe: I don't know. It's a mystery.

Replace "theatre" with "robotics" and you begin to understand...

[sciencenerd]

We are using the kitbot frame with minor modifications, and have that all designed. Our [strikeout]arm[/strikeout]* mechanism team has also created a shooter prototype. It seems to work well, so now we are tweaking it and finding the best configuration, making a final model, and moving on to the next challenge.

*I've been guilty of calling it the "arm" team accidentally more than once, and been ridiculed. My team also made fun of me for calling it that on Chief Delphi once as well, so here I am, making public amends to the community at large.