off season mods

[Doug G]

Originally Posted by Otaku

That "one team" was 1678, yeah.

I'm actually considering talking to my team's sponsors. And as a bonus, I could modify the power system to work in parallel (basically, doubling or tripling the battery life depending on the amount of batteries I use).

That's why the Radio-controlled would be so awesome, is because I could walk behind it as I drove it, or sit in it. But that would take 7.2v batteries for the OI.

Too funny, that's what we've started with our Team as well after seeing Davis HS (1678) do that. The students want to do armchair races and such. We may use a mecanum setup as shown in the attached picture. We've had some students working on a basic mecanum platform for the past month. It runs off a VEX controller and some old 883's from year's past. They wanted to use our old pBasic controllers, but I pushed them to use the VEX and continue to develop programming skills in C. They also use a VEX RC unit to drive it.

Here's a video of it running..

Now to find a LazyBoy to stick on top of it!!

[Otaku]

That's cool.

If (and/or when) I get the nessacary parts, I'll probably just make a simple tank-drive bot with Kitbot chassis parts just for driving around. I'm thinking, however, of making a pneumatic robotic artillery gun, that can drive and fire simultaneously, as well as change barrel angle and rotation (to about 30 degrees either way).

[Doug G]

Originally Posted by Otaku

That's cool.

If (and/or when) I get the nessacary parts, I'll probably just make a simple tank-drive bot with Kitbot chassis parts just for driving around. I'm thinking, however, of making a pneumatic robotic artillery gun, that can drive and fire simultaneously, as well as change barrel angle and rotation (to about 30 degrees either way).

I think we're thinking along the same lines.. see this thread. We should be able to interchange our cannon system with "hopefully" an arm chair

[Al Skierkiewicz]

Batteries don't like being placed in parallel without some steering diodes to prevent self discharge.

[Adama]

Originally Posted by Qbranch

ok.. unfortuantely i dont have any pictures of that part of the robot. but i can give you some details.

the cims are mounted facing toward the left and right sides of the robot and have a #25 chain sprocket on them running to another sprocket to achieve a 2:1 ratio. this sprocket is on a keyshaft that has several ball bearings on it since this shaft has a good number of pounds on it (around or a little above 100 i believe). the shaft has another cim/chain/sprocket combo mounted on the other side as a mirror image.

On the shaft there are four timing belt pulleys and one larger timing belt pulley to run to the shaft encoder that the servo routine uses for feedback (the elevator moves too quickly for a human to control). the other pulleys run to the very long lengths of timing belt which run the extension of the elevator, ours is a triple-extension arm, if you need explanation on that part i can give one.

we would have used the belt pulley right there on the cim.... but its next to impossible to find that 3mm pitch or whatever it is timing belt. there's places that have it, but its used in many products apparently so they arent too interested in small quantity customers.

-q

thanks