What have I learned these six weeks? Too much–my brain is still hurting.
Perhaps the biggest and most visible thing this year is that I learned what goes into creating a jointed arm. Until this season, 1618 hadn’t created any significant manipulators, and 1293 had only done one successful manipulator, a 80/20 elevator that could largely be ruled out for our purposes due to cost constraints. (People are said to have champagne tastes and a beer budget; we had 80/20 tastes and a PVC budget.) The arm came together with a lot of help from folks far too far away, like Madison Krass, Mike Walker, and Roger Riquelme, along with staring at pictures for far too long on CD-Media (particularly this one, since it shows 330’s method of rigging it up quite well).
I also learned a thing or two about double-checking work. Much of our coulda-been practice time was debugging generally silly mistakes, ones that could have been prevented with a little documentation check. Irritating, but you live and learn.
This season, I learned to love the KOP joysticks. I went into the season planning on continuing the controls approach 1293 took last season–chop the top, replace with a smaller handle–but we shipped four stockers in the crate. One might get replaced at Palmetto with switches, but overall I’ve been surprisingly satisfied with them.
We had a really small crew this year–we’ll be bringing about six or seven kids to Palmetto, plus three mentors. It took a lot of five-day weeks, a lot of early mornings, and a lot of worrying about whether we’d actually get it done, but the gut feeling I had as we crated it up was one I hadn’t had since my rookie year back in high school (and this time, there’s no rookie naivety mixed in). There weren’t many of them, but the ones that held on were some of the best kids I’ve had the pleasure of working with in this program.
One thing that frustrated me to no end was learning some of the limitations of CAD, and not getting some of those elements that seem too trivial to CAD, like chain and spacers. I hadn’t anticipated chain interfering with the AM Shifters’ mount (the Kitbot chassis stiffeners), which led to a change to implement idler sprockets. So far, so good.
Perhaps the single most important thing I learned this year is that of staying in touch. This is my first season with 1618, and my first venture out of the familiar waters of my high school team, 1293. I claim no credit in the construction of their robot this year, but keeping ties with them has been beneficial for both teams. Whether it was throwing our robot in my car to check its weight at their facility, bringing over a BaneBots transmission to replace a blown unit, or just shooting the breeze with each other, we’ve sort of succeeded in covering each others’ bases. It’s an important lesson I’d tell anybody who’s going to be moving on soon, particularly to another team in the area: keep in touch.
I learned not to trust USC Postal Services with any parts whatsoever, and I found out why AM Shifters are so darn popular. (I also found out how awesome AndyMark’s service is, certainly awesome enough for some real estate on the back of the robot–look right above the plywood sticking out of the back of the tower.)
Oh, and I learned that is, in fact, possible to have a virtually leak-free pneumatics system. Naturally, this happens the year we have the weight to leave the compressor on.
