Hello everyone and welcome to team 7312/T3’s 2023 Build Thread. We are based out of Tomball High School in Tomball, Texas and this is our 5th year in competition.
Kickoff:
We did our kickoff event with the other teams from our school district (8177/Vector and 7691/TSA All Stars). After the livestream, we split up into smaller groups to examine the game manual closer so we could get a better understanding of the rules. Our main takeaways from the manual were the penalties in the game, mainly G207 or “A ROBOT with any part of itself in their opponent’s LOADING ZONE or COMMUNITY may not contact an opponent ROBOT, regardless of who initiates contact.” Another main takeaway was that, unlike the cargo from last year, a robot may only have control of one game piece at a time. After reviewing the manual with the other teams in groups we acted out the game with humans in place of robots to gain an understanding of the game and get some ideas for how a robot could potentially maneuver and manipulate game pieces. After playing the game we split out into our subteams to see how our experiences from playing the game could affect our design and come up with a few ideas. Later this week I will share the full results of our individual team’s brainstorming and hopefully the beginnings of our CAD.
Update 1:
Over this past week we worked to come up with a general design idea for our robot, we ended up coming up with a very similar design as Cranberry Alarm Ri3D with a central pivoting cascading gearbox driven by a pulley system. We also are going to try to make some kind of adjustable ballast within our belly, but we don’t have any specifics on that. We have yet to decide how to grab the game pieces, but by the end of next week we will have a design for it.
Moving in to next week the current goal is to have our design team finish our CAD (found here) while our mechatronics team works on organizing our lab and getting it ready to build.
Edit:
I forgot about the fact that we finished attaching the motors to our swerve modules this week
This week we didn’t do much in the area of mechatronics, just worked on cleaning the lab to get it ready to build for the season. After organizing we began construction on our game pieces.
The Robot CAD is almost complete for us to begin building on Monday.
We did start and almost finish our test base for swerve until we finish up the CAD and can create our final drivetrain
Update 3:
This week we finished our CAD up and begun cutting prices for the final bot. Our bandsaw and sander are a bit messed up so we were not able to get our cuts super square yet, so that will be a focus for the coming week. Also in the coming week we will begin CNCing our baseplate.
https://youtu.be/cZjAwtBkZoA 7312 T3 is making awesome progress with their pathfinder autonomous plans and showcases their CAD and intake progress on The Open Alliance Show.
I heard in your showcase on the OA show that you use 3D printing on your robot from one of your sponsors. That sounds amazing! I am wondering what material is and how you use it vs more standard materials like PLA and ABS. Also, do you have any pictures of how what you have made with it this year so far?
The technology we plan on using is HP Multijet Fusion and the standard material is PA12 Nylon, the printing process is very similar to SLS, leading to higher resolution and stronger parts. We tend to use MJF over standard FDM because of the aforementioned strength over ABS and especially PLA. We don’t have any parts using it this year, but we used MJF parts for the hood on our shooter last year
This past week was a big one, we tested gripper, got swerve working, and painted our parts
Gripper
As we showed on OA show, our gripper is a piston-activated 3d printed gripper, we did some tests and ended up coming up with using a 3/4” bore 4” stroke piston with a small mechanism and some bolts to fine-tune where it actuates. We will probably end up using shoulder bolts and bushings in the holes to get smoother movement.
