Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Compton
Hey all,
Fantastic machine! Can't get platforms any lower to the ground than that! Tell me... how do you deploy them - what is the mechanism that you lower them by? It looks very under control but I can;t decipher how you do it.
Thanks!
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I'm glad you ask. The platforms end up about 1.5" off the ground, in the lowered position. The philosophy here is that getting up a ramp may be a bit sketchy, and not all robots will be able to. So, we tried to make it easy. With the couple extra pounds we have to spare, we are looking into adding small leader ramps for the small percentage of robots that can't get over a 1.5" step.
I take it you've seen the YouTube video of the deploy? It is quite ingenious how they are deployed actually. The wings are held in by small aircraft cables, placed on hooks near the arm joint. There are springs that push the wings outward to give them the initial "kick" to start the fall. When the arm is raised all the way back over itself, it pushes the cables off the hooks, the springs push the wings past vertical, and they fall right to the ground. And it appears that air resistance slows them a little. When the cables release from their hooks, surgical tubing is used to retract the cables and take up all the slack, so we don't have dangling cables anywhere. There is a pot and a software lockout on the arm so it cannot go to the point of wing deploy until it is told to do so.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Gabe
I noticed that this year you didn't use Colson wheels like previous years. Any reason why?
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We never had a problem with colson wheels last year. But, we looked at the situation like this. We needed something light and narrow. We had a CNC available to use. We would have had to machine out and machine hubs for the colsons. So, why not just machine our own wheels? I'm glad we did. They are <0.5 lbs ea with tread.
And
here's a quite comical video taken before we fixed the software.