Moderato Cantabile
(moderately and singingly)
Build Season Week 5
Intro
Another build week means more things to share! This week we’ve been very productive with finishing up some of the CAD, starting to cut and build our intake and shooter, and managing some other business.
CAD! CAD! CAD! CAD! CAD!
Climber
Here is the climber. We made additional changes.
The main limiting factor behind getting the drive rails completed is finishing the climber to a point where we are happy with. A major constraint is the space to drive it, given that it must have enough force to pick up ½ the bot in a very cramped area.
These maybe-mounts for the passive hooks we initially were considering for simplicity, but will be opting instead to use the shooter A-Frame in order to maximize our internal space usage.
Elevator
We manufactured some parts for the elevator.
A key take away for this is to always check your zeros when CNCing. We had to redo one of the beams from a very slight offset. We hope next week we will be able to test our rigging ideas for the elevator.
Current main
Here is our current main.
Stuff we built
Intake
Over the weekend we cut out the side and carriage plates we needed for our intake. We currently have the first prototype assembled, but we have learned a few things during the process. For one, we did not CAD the fasteners, which turned out to be a mistake on our part during the assembly process. The rollers had to be cut down in order to give way for the bearing attachments.
We also opted to wrap the roller tubes in silicone rather than neoprene, which ultimately proved to be much a more arduous task to put on, but is certainly more grippy.
Here’s a video of it in action:
Sticker + Batteries
Over the weekend we had some fun with making stickers. I love stickers, you probably love stickers, we all love stickers! One of the first things we did was make stickers for our batteries, as we just got new batteries and they needed labeling. It was also a perfect opportunity to refresh our Cricut skills, so these are how they turned out:
We also took the opportunity to mark the batteries we got at worlds last year, and didn’t already have a label
A Note on Labeling Systems
Last year we made the decision to adopt a new Numbering/Labeling scheme for our competition batteries. The goal was for the names to be distinct from each other and simple. Labeling them 2023-1, 2023-2 ect wasn’t a good idea in our opinion. Many ideas were kicked around including naming the batteries after Pokemon, seems like a great idea as a list to draw from, there’s lots of options (at least 151 in fact) but after an hour-long debate between the mentors and students over which generation Pokedex we should use as a source of names we realized that the amount of choice was getting in the way of simplicity. Eventually, we settled on the Greek alphabet but that character set is going to run out next year given our current rate of battery acquisition.
Bumper
After that we decided to run a test with making a sticker and printing it onto some fabric, which was very successful. We created a happy flower for our first test. Our goal for this year is going to try and make our custom team number stickers for some extra aesthetics. Last year our bumpers ripped quite a bit and we had to repair them for DCMP, so this year we are trying another bumper fabric, but the consequence is we now have to do our own bumper numbers
Camera mounts
One of our team members printed out some camera mounts made of TPU plastic. We really like how flexible and durable it is, it is the first TPU part we have on this bot. We tactically borrowed these from 6328’s cad. Code has not had a chance to implement these positions and test vision.
Outro
It’s been another productive week here at 1757. Our midweek and next weekend will be among the most critical as it is the week before February break, so expect a lot (and we mean A LOT) of tasks to be completed/started during that time. So now it’s a matter of how much we can take advantage of our surplus of time. In the meantime, we will update you on everything that happens, and as always, please reach out to us if you have any questions!
Best wishes,
Team 1757
Written by: Baili, Liam, An, Luke
P.S.
Programming post coming soon…