Robot reveal video for our Aerial Assist Robot, The Crimson Chain. We were at Arizona and we will be at Vegas!
We restarted team 2478 this year at “inner city” Westwood High School. We have six veteran members and 30 rookies. We’re all pretty proud of our:
-Automated Variable Tension system
-30 foot truss pass shots
-High goals from truss
-Fast and effective pickup
-West Coast Drive
-Sensor Integration
Enjoy!
Looks great! I love the amount of engineering that went into the leadscrew tensioner and latch. Hopefully your reset time isn’t too bothersome . Good luck!
Love the tensioner!
I really like that your catapult doesn’t need a hard stop.
Our tensioner was a little slow for us at Arizona so we switched out the acme rod from 5 turns per inch to 2 turns per inch. Now it takes about 3 seconds to get from top to bottom, instead of the 8ish we had before.
Wow. Great improvement! Good luck in Las Vegas.
This robot is awesome. It’s very thorough, intricate, and innovative. Not once during build season did an idea like this cross my mind. It was good playing with you guys in Vegas! Awesome drive team, too!
We made some changes for championship! Worked on our auton, added flaps, lights, and a slight change in our controllers!
Put me on the “love the tensioner” bandwagon.
Do you have presets for different tension amounts to facilitate different types of shots?
Yes we do:)
I absolutely love your variable tension, and how you just loosen it all the way to “winch” back.
How do you avoid backdriving the variable tensioner?
Thanks for the compliment! 
We are capable of doing lots of different shot ranges, but we still strongly prefer specific ranges that have the highest accuracy. We have 4 presets to choose from, some for trussing and passing, others for scoring.
We have limit switches on the top and bottom of the mechanism that serve as the last line of defense, but we use two potentiometers to move to the preset positions, so we’ll never run against the bottom limit unless both pots fail.
Pretty sure the anti-back-drive feature is simply through virtue of using a lead screw, which inherently doesn’t back-drive.
Yeah, driving them past their limits is the bigger danger.
We tried a leadscrew climber last year, and someone put untested autonomous code on the field during our last practice match thursday. Well, the CIM went backwards instead of forwards, and so the screw went down instead of up, and it basically tore itself and a large portion of the robot apart. :rolleyes: