All modeling was done in Inventor 2014 and we rendered it using Keyshot. The climber, shooter, and mecanum intake roller were designed using 2D sketches and heavy prototyping on our practice frame so they never made it into the 3D model.
Love it. You guys made a very solid robot this year and should be proud of all your successes.
This looks great! Nice work.
What’s the purpose of that CIM and angled 2x1 attached to the uprights? Is that a scrapped Class A manipulator? Catapult?
Hanger winch. Note how it’s tied into the structure of the robot to support the full weight.
Doesn’t looked like it’s tied. I see the pulley though, so it makes sense. Looks like it didn’t make it to the final robot, looking at pictures. It seems they had a very different climber at IRI.
The CIM was for our winch on the climber. The piece of hex shaft that comes out is where we attached our 1/2inch ratchet to prevent backdrive. The shooter was mounted in that A frame section later on.
Also the climber is the same one we’ve been using since our first event at North Shore.
More renders can be found here: https://imgur.com/a/uQfor
Easily one of the best robots in New England this year as their pile of blue banners can attest to.
Hard to believe you guys got that climber to work so reliably without CAD. It was fun playing with you guys at both North Shore and DCMP. You might have inspired me to post 319’s CAD too.
Wow, this is an amazing render, probably the best I’ve seen in years! Did you purposefully put the washers offset a tad or is that just the perspective working on me? How long did the rendering process take? How did you put the lines into the aluminum?
Well there was some CAD. the three main linkage arms that make up the majority of the climber were developed by a mentor and a few students to see how the double linkage would fit along the 30" back rail. It was just a few extruded tubes but they played around with it enough to know we could fit it all in the space we needed.
Everything else like the hook deployment, cable routing, hinge, lock, etc was developed off the robot. While a small group was attending Week Zero a good portion of the team was back at the shop trying to figure out how to get the hook up the last few inches we needed. One of our freshman came up with the spring loaded piston and torsion spring concept we used.
It took a lot of small tweaks to make it work so as Reading approached we didn’t have time to finish the more polished competition version so our initial prototype/beta climber was moved over to the practice robot as part of our withholding allowance and is still on the competition robot.
1058 really enjoyed Reading and NECHAMPS with you guys as well!
I hope more teams post their CAD models online. Sharing models really helps students and teams grow. One of our Seniors, Luc, did almost all of the CAD work this year with previous robots and lessons from other teams influencing the design.
Its just the perspective. 
Renders in Keyshot take about an hour for these more detailed models but my computer isn’t a top of the line machine for CAD work. Its roughly the same time as Inventor/Solidworks however the extra time to import the model and set properties is made up by a higher quality render but I’ve seen some really nice ones done in Solidworks.
Keyshot has a lot of visual properties and the one we used on most of the aluminum was a brushed aluminum that we slightly modified so it was more of a subtle scratched surface more realistic to what we purchase from suppliers.
A lot of the detail work like hardware, chains, and pnuematics was done just for a more complete render.
Looks fantastic. Really cool to hear that much of the design work took place out of 3D CAD.
Glad to see such a great render of such an awesome robot.
~Zac
Can we just take some time to appreciate the name Low Expectations. I’m going to show this to my team, that this is what good names are like
The name came from our late design change this year. At the end of week four of build season we had our two drivebases machined and driving over the defenses. We had a good batter catapult prototyped, solid concepts being worked on for scaling, a Portcullis/CDF manipulator designed, and an intake that hadn’t been tested but was in our design. We didn’t like how the catapult/intake were fitting in our model and felt to make it work we had to sacrifice the Low Bar from one end, possibly two.
We had a big team meeting that Saturday to plan out what we needed to focus on with two weeks left before scrimmage. Our goal was we had a Week Zero scrimmage in two weeks and whatever we sent there we wanted to closely resemble what we would be competing with at Reading in Week 2. After re-evaluating the game, we felt it was in our best interests to focus on solo-breaching, scoring a few balls down low, and potentially climbing knowing we had a better chance of building a scaler compared to dialing in a catapult.
So we spent a few more days coming up with a new intake from scratch that doubled as our Portcullis/CDF manipulator to make the robot even simpler, left space open for an eventual catapult, and focused a lot of the mechanical efforts on developing a climber with a two weeks to go.
While attending Week Zero we were asked what our robot’s name was and we had occasionally joked around about calling it Low Expecations since it was a only a low bar & low goal machine with this feeling it wasn’t enough. After a very successful day we knew we made the correct decision two weeks early so we stuck with the ironic name not knowing it would lead to several awards including three banners all from a group of very hard working students giving it their all this year.
