Welcome to our build thread!
There isn’t much here, but we had a lot we did these past two days.
You probably already read all the other OA posts detailing strategy, so I’ll just recap some of the main strategies and prototypes we did. Expect lots to come! (Or maybe not too much, most of the stuff will be on the discord, we will try our best, though!
Edit:
We also experimented with the drive train and the charging station today. We questioned whether the wheels would have enough traction on the polycarbonate for the robot to stay in place. Although the testing setup may have had issues that contributed to this, there was some minor slippage on a 15-degree incline. An easy way to mitigate this was to turn the wheels at an angle to improve traction, which held on very strongly. Although we aren’t sure about the sensitivity of the charging station as we haven’t built anything to test it yet, we imagine a potential tool we can develop is an algorithm to shift the position of the robot to utilize leverage to balance the scale even if alliance partners cannot accurately align themselves in the center. After overthinking the physics massively, we’ve begun coding a simple bang-bang-based solution and are looking to build a more robust solution once we have the resources to test it.
Goals:
Maintain driver uptime to as close to 100 percent as much as possible
Finish prototype bot by day 9-12
Finish Final bot by day 29
Prototype/Alpha bot specs:
L1/L2 Scoring
Shelf Pickup
A lot of drive practice
Potentially yeet cubes to l3
Reuse our old offseason chassis
Literally a 1dof arm on a pivot. It’s probably the same as the everybot
Final/comp bot specs/Priority List:
Comp Bot Priority list pt2 (assuming alpha derived):
- Floor cube pickup
- L3 Cube scoring
- L3 cone scoring
- L3 cone pickup (not very likely)
- L3 sideways cone pickup (probably won’t happen)
We also played with some auto-leveling code.
Some notes about auto leveling:
You should probably only have one auto-leveling robot at a time.
Figure out a way to stay on the platform after you level so that the other robot levels.
There are more posts on the way about this, I just wanted to get something out asap.
You can also stay still if the wheels are in an x shape on polycarbonate with basically zero slippage. In break mode, there’s a little bit, though.
Day 2 happenings:
Made two intake iterations:
Iteration 1 (did not record much):
Iteration 2:
Changed roller positions of bearings, hugging cone instead of gripping
(if videos don’t work, I’ll figure something out later)
Our freshmen were also shooting the cubes.
We popped the single cube like five times this meeting, do as you please with this information.
This is all alpha bot and super preliminary, so it will change fast. If you really want cad, I can send it to ya, though, but it won’t be very useful.
We want to finish by the end of this week/start of next week, but I need to check if my mentor is awake to order some stuff.
In theory, most of our alpha cad should be done soon. I’m getting tired, though… we will try our best!
Feel free to ask questions. Good luck with your season!
so there’s lots of planning to make the meetings work)
it hurts my brain sometimes. Even 1dof arms are hard, this was wayyyy more difficult than I expected, and every design decision impacts the rest of the robot.
