Mechanical/Electrical Off-Season Projects

Here's a render of my current project. I got bored last night and began modeling a new crab, combining a couple of team's designs. Feedback welcome. (and if anyone has the resources/interest to actually build the thing as a prototype, I'll be glad to share the CAD...)

[Pavan Dave]

A black box.
Research on PCBs.
GPS project (Hopefully).

Pavan.

[Guy Davidson]

Building a mecanum driven arm chair, to learn how to build and code macanum drive trains.

[Priyadarshy]

building and playing around with swerve drive

[Madison]

I split this into a new thread, as the original thread was created to focus upon 3D animation projects.

Just an FYI.

[K.Porter]

I'm currently working with a couple teammates in taking apart and rebuilding the Aim High robot and turning it into a prototype/base frame.

Essentially I'm stripping it down to a drive train and pneumatics system, and an overbuilt electrical layout so that I can plug anything and everything into it. When we have new sensors, motors, arms, or whatever else that needs to be tested out, just snap them into the terminal strips and go.

Next step; get the camera, gear tooth sensors, and gyro/accelerometer working flawlessly on this chassis, so it's just a quick change over to next year's bot instead of frantic troubleshooting when the robot gets handed over to the controls team in the last few build days next year.

[Brad Voracek]

Sensors. Lots of them.

Our team has a problem... that didn't really become apparent to me until late this year. We have no experience with them. This is our 8th year as a team, and our advisor didn't want us to buy sensors for our lift, which I had planned out in the beginning of the year. He didn't allow us to buy them, and said "limit switches will be easy to install at the end of the six weeks, after we get it working." Well... to say the least they didn't get working. So now we rely on the drivers, which isn't so bad. But with some sensors it could be ten times better and faster.

So in the off season I plan to buy some pots, install some gyros, and get that camera aligning our robot, and then do some sweet stuff with the press of a button... then hopefully next year will be ten times better.

[GUI]

Several other club members and I are going to rebuild our promotional mecanum t-shirt cannon. I'm planning on adding suspension to the kit frame for the chassis and making the cannon semi-automatic. I haven't done any Inventor models yet, but I'll post some when I get them done. We also plan on participating in NURC.

[Otaku]

-Some sort of Combat Robot (probably working with Near Chaos Robotics members)

-Studying Swerve & Crab drives, plus Mecanums & Omnidrives.

-Try and buy materials for a chassis & BaneBots CIM's and 56mm Transmissions (to make a non-FIRST bot for whatever tasks I feel like)

[Gabe]

-9:00 a.m. - bought a breast drill at garage sale for $3

-10:00 a.m. - oiled every moving part to try to release rusted parts (not expected to work.)

-10:30 a.m. - cut and built a spit for outdoor barbecue for dinner tonight (made dad happy)

-3:00 p.m.- begin working on dissasembly of drill (oil worked), and discover many cool things about it:
- two speeds (1:1 and 3:1)
- spirit level
- push-button release for gears
- 3 handle settings
- ball bearings with nuts to take up wear

An excellent tool that will serve for many more years in my garage. Very good deal for what I paid originally!

[=Martin=Taylor=]

Prototyping a drivetrain in the offseason paid off enormously for us this year.
If next years game requires us to climb things I'd like to be ready.

I'd also like to see our robot perfected for CAL Games.

Only difference is that I'm going to try and get our Freshmen and Sophomores to do all the mechanics.

[s_forbes]

Another ex team member and I plan on returning for the summer to force our team to work. She was going to teach fundraising abilities, while I was hoping to stimulate some cool projects. We have an excellent drivebase this year that can have it's arm/ramps easily removed, so our programmers should have something to play with over the summer as well.

[technoL]

Personally, I will be working on perfecting my Inventor skills and playing around with some ideas I have in Vex.

I'm not too sure if 108 can get together and do anything, but I would love to get the '06 bot back together, in it's original form, or as something else.

-No L

[meiv4]

This is my off season project, been drawing it for the last few days and started ordering parts today. It's a 2 speed ball lock shifting transmission for 2 cims. The inspiration was some pictures of team 222's tigerdrive from 2006.
Picture

[Joe Matt]

Probably do some understudy work at my dad's work (hopefully), and maybe learn more about drive systems from someone I idolize (again, hopefully.)

Oh, and work more on web sites and getting podcasts out.