pic: Team 1538 Time Lapse

[Jon Jack]

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[Navid Shafa]

HOLY COW!!

[Akash Rastogi]

Ewwwwww

Your cow is regurgitating all over the carpet! Does she have 4 stomachs for ball storage?

Looks like a competitive bot once again. Great job.

[akeisic]

Looks great! Where are you guys competing this year?

[cdennisxlx2]

looks like one of your lower belts fell off the roller there jon, lol

[Jon Jack]

Originally Posted by cdennisxlx2

looks like one of your lower belts fell off the roller there jon, lol

It's not, it's an illusion. We haven't had a single belt fall off since Sunday afternoon. We took the bot back Sunday evening and made some modifications to keep the belts on the rollers.

As for where we are competing:
San Diego
Las Vegas
Atlanta

[cdennisxlx2]

ahh, i didn't get a chance to see it yesterday so....

wow we are all going to the same events this year, lol

[MrForbes]

Originally Posted by Navid Shafa

HOLY COW!!

someone always beats me to it

[Caio]

What's your robot's weight? And what material did you use for your hopper/conveyor?

[chaoticprout]

1538 is a class act and one of my favorite teams. Great looking robot and good luck to you guys, rooting you guys on!

[Jon Jack]

Our weight is 115lbs, but we're going to be losing weight. Right now we're running steel sprockets on our pick up and dumping systems, we're going to be running aluminum sprockets on the output end of the reduction.

Our hopper is built in three panels, each made of .0625" lexan. The pickup scoop, dumper backings are made of .125" lexan. We formed all of our plastic with a series of fixtures and two heat guns. It's quite easy. We spent a total of 2-3 hours cutting and forming all the plastic for one and a half robots.

Our belts are made of 5/16" urethane. We found a cheap source of cord stock and a belt welder that is half the cost of the one McMaster sells. Without these two finds we would not have used urethane. The rollers are made from UHMW tubing with aluminum end caps.

While this design looks simple, there was a lot of testing done. We originally were running 10 belts for pickup and 19 for dumping, but when we first ran the two systems we were pulling over 100 amps! After optimizing the efficiencies in both systems they now pull about 28 amps per motor. We did this by tuning the chain tension, increasing the reduction, cutting down the number of belts, testing different groove depths and widths and remaking some of the belts to be a bit loser. All in all we spent about a week optimizing our pickup and dumping systems.

Our goal with this design from almost day one was:

• Able to pickup and score any ball, without discriminating between 'good' and 'bad' conditions.
• Pickup effortlessly from the floor and to quickly get the balls in our hopper
• Provide a large opening for PS to throw into.
• Keep the hopper low so immobile alliance partners can dump in our hopper as well over/under-thrown balls to land in.
• Fill a trailer within seconds, knowing that opportunities to score for a dumper would have potentially very narrow time windows.
• Make sure that any balls we missed during a dump could easily be recycled back into our robot.
• Have our exit point be high enough to score at any location around the trailer
• Keep the number of mechanical systems to a minimum.
• Make everything accessible and simple to repair.

So far our robot has accomplished all of these to some degree. At our pre-ship scrimmage held over the weekend we were pleasantly surprised by how many points we can score with even the smallest windows of opportunity.