Week 3 Update
Prototyping
After missing a week due to ice, we finally got back into our shop last Saturday, with a focus on prototyping, particularly with shooters.
While our original CAD had a side-by-side flywheel shooter, we suspected that top-bottom shooters were better than we initially thought, based on other teams’ prototyping, and our most successful prototype confirmed it:
This shooter uses 8 80a 4” stealth wheels with .5” of vertical compression, and 2” of horizontal compression.
Unfortunately, we don’t have good footage of repeated testing, but it was quite consistent and made straight shots from distance.
Due to our success with the top-bottom flywheel prototype, we updated our shooter in CAD and added centering wheels to our intake. We opted to replace a roller from our second set of intake rollers with a sheet of HDPE to guide the note into the centering wheels. This reduces the grip on the note from the intake as it enters the centering wheels, allowing it to be easily centered. We will also experiment with various amounts of (or lack of) grip tape to allow for ease of centering.
Our updated note path looks like this:
Here’s a video of this geometry being tested:
Inspired by Team 3467, we also decided to change the construction of our arm pivot from dead-axle SplineXL with an off-axis encoder to live-axle MaxSpline with hex endcaps and hex bushings to allow for an on-axis encoder. The hope is that this will make assembly and maintenance of the setup easier, along with reducing encoder backlash.
Beginning Assembly and Fabrication
After making these changes to our CAD, we finally began fabrication and assembly at the end of this week. After finding so much success with it during bunnybots, we are implementing kitting and cut lists again. These allow us to get all the parts we need for a subsystem together before we begin assembly, allowing a lot more people to work in parallel and making everything go quicker.
*Each box is for one subsystem
