This is 1458’s robot, currently un-named. We finished except programming Friday night, and crated to go to 692’s practice competition on Saturday morning. We had a good few matches, our turret not programmed so we had to aim it by eye and not camera. Our 5th or so match we got a hard full speed hit directly on our side and our side plates, acrylic due to money issues, sheared at their mounting points.
We decided to stop cheaping out on important pieces, drove straight to the nearest plastic seller and bought two pieces of 1/4in lexan. We routed out two new side panels, and got them mounted that night. This morning it’s all back together and good again. The fun of the end of build season, and the lessons we learn from practice days, I’m just glad this didn’t happen at real competition.
Description of our bot:
Drive-two toughboxes one CIM each, traction control is being implemented hopefully. The back two wheels drive, the front two don’t, they’re more of just a wheelie bar
Pickup- Ground pickup, and a fairly large hopper. Surgical tubing bands, along with rough top traction material. We have two band systems, one in the front on a toughbox with a stage removed and a window motor on the back geared towards speed.(second picture in the row of pictures shows this) The ball’s route is changed based on the direction of the back roller.
Shooter-belt driven on a CIM with a 3:1 ratio. 4-6 foot range, rotates 180 degrees on a window motor and it’s direction and speed of the shooter is all controlled by the camera.
what are you doing to attach the two ends of the surgical tubing together, my team is having a hard time with this. Right now we are using a piece of pneumatic tubing with spray adhesive on it.
Its a challenge, no doubt. Were trying to make it so the robot can zero itself on the start of autonomous mode, but Im hoping I can get it done tomorrow with a few solid hours of work. We’ve got a 10 turn pot spinning with the turret motor, so we know where its pointing, and we use the pan value of the servo to move the turret to face the same direction as the camera after its locked onto the target. For turret speed, its either going to be based on the range of the target, or just a full speed/half speed sorta thing the operator just eye-balls
We have a similar story, but it’s happened twice. For our scrimmage we didn’t have a tall enough truck to take everything in, so we only took the drive base. Go figure, our 3/8" clearance wasn’t enough to get over the curling on the sides of the glassliner panels since the robot slightly sinks on them due to the carpet undernearth. 3 hours of work later, and that problem was easily fixed with elevator bolts.
Then, yesterday during practice our honeycomb aluminum & fiberglass floor cracked at one of the pivot points for the kick modules. Now we’re reinforcing it with an aluminum plate on either side of the fiberglass and in another hour or so the epoxy we set in place last night at 2am should be done. :rolleyes: … it’s been a loooong weekend! Our latest recurring theme is “It’s a good thing this didn’t happen at competition. It’d be a bad day if it did.”
Yet our bot is by far the funnest thing I’ve ever driven/played with/built/got cut up & knicked for. So it’s worth it, and it’ll be ready for DC … next week ?! :ahh:.
Curling? Were the panels not taped down to the carpet on the field you were on?
I guess it was a good move anyways, but I’m questioning whether or not it was needed.
Sometimes you want to see the actual competition field before you make (major?) changes to your robot like that.
We are using a piece of pneumatic tubing and two small zipties on both sides of the connection. If your surgical tubing is stretched a bit it helps. It’s like one of those Chinese finger traps the more you stretch the harder it is to pull out.
man, a hit like that on a competition day would be a killer, especially if it took a day to fix. is it possible to put a metal substructure to hold your rollers in place so that cant happen again?
We changed from acrylic to lexan which should fix any possibility of shearing off, and we added two more mounting points. We may add a bit more metal, but we’re close to weight right now.