This is our practice bot. The production bot is being powder coated tomorrow morning
The router won’t stay there (ha)
c.g. is waaaay off since the upper mechanisms aren’t there to balance it out
This is the perfect year to try WCD. 4WD is pretty awesome; ~55A during turns (our lowest ever) since the wheels are so far out. Putting the vertical towers on the outside really helped us free up the middle for disc launching.
Drive train is 24lbs. ~10.3ft/s post-losses, direct-driven.
Total bot will be around 90lbs. We expect to have to ballast it.
Frame is welded like that since we thought we may drive up the corner of the pyramid (wanted a smooth transition as the bot tilted. We scrapped that idea at the end of Week 1, yet the drive train was already designed & mostly fab’ed.
Programmers got ‘drive straight’ working tonight.
There seems to be a sensitivity issue with the Attack 3 joysticks. Have to get new ones since the ones we tested on are 4 years old.
The patch panel represents 1 mechanism’s sensors per port (e.g. 2 limit switches + 1 pot), 4 single/2 double acting solenoids per port, or an actual network connection into the router.
It’s much easier for us to label & read when we’re interchanging the electronics board or parts. In particular, it will allow us to use the board for several offseason projects with several novices – preventing them from (e.g.) frying a digital side car by not paying attention. The panel itself is from 1/16" sheet metal, though I think they went to 1/8" black ABS for the production version. The mounts also create a nice channel for the moving chain to go through the board. I think they pulled out excess twisted pairs from the Cat6 cables. Overall, both connector panels add roughly 2.5 lbs when considering the panels, connectors, and additional wires. Since the drive train was so light (lightest in 6 years) we figured the weight is fine for this year.
On the opposite side of the board are mini-anderson connectors in their black 2-pair block mounts.
That’s what I know; I can get you in touch with our electronics guys if you want to know more.
(Edit – sorry, I sound a bit blah … long day at work ><)
4 wheel WCD. Cool. I can’t wait to see how that works out. I would have liked to have given that a try, but we’re trying to keep our drive train experimentation in the off season.
