Team 291’s competition robot is very near done! With just a few tweaks and things to add. We are super excited to have a working robot on time this year! We decided to specialize this year, and focus on being really fast at gears and climbing. So far it seems to have been a good choice for us! During our driver tryouts, this robot got 7 gears in 2 minutes. This was on an open field with the chute about 10 feet closer to the peg than it will actually be, but with lots of driver practice we are going to shoot for 15 second cycles on a properly sized field.
Features:
-Our Active Gear mechanism leaves the gear on the peg very consistently and quickly.
-Loads the gear from the front from the chute.
-Climbs the rope in 3.5 seconds.
-Dual Speed drive train 18.5 fps high gear, 5 fps low gear
See you at Pittsburgh and Buckeye! And let me know what you think!
In the linked video, it was 9 seconds from motor activation to the touchpad activation. As you guys tune your climber and go into your matches, make sure you account for this! It is precious time taken off of your gear cycles. As a gear specialist ourselves, the whole act of climbing is something we found to be very important. You may be able to improve the time with just a knot at the right height.
And we have accounted for 10 seconds to hang at the end of the match. That was our first climb test, so we wanted to be gingerly with it. :rolleyes: We will have the knot higher and just drive right into it in a match
We were using a monkey fist knot in the video, but have since changed it to a different, flatter knot that works just as well with our climber. I call it the triangle knot. It is flatter, because we had a problem with the rope wrapping around the ~1" monkey knot and stalling the winch because the effective diameter became too big. The new knot fixed this perfectly though.
What kind of rope have you settled on? Have you checked to make sure you can activate the touchpad before hitting the davit channel? From where I can see it could go either way.
As of now we are using a thinner solid braid rope. The vertical struts are meant to activate the touchpad, but we still have a lot of testing to do, and it’s hard to be sure without an actual touchpad to try it on. If we do find that to be a problem, we are still a few inches under the 24" limit in the back, so we could add longer struts if we need to.
Our practice robot is also coming along nicely! We plan on having the gear scorer on it, but not the winch as there is plenty of time for climb testing before bag day.
Our team was having a difficult time determining how to attach our bumpers and I really liked your usage of wingnuts. How quickly would you estimate you are able to remove and replace your bumpers currently?
This is our first year doing one piece bumpers, but so far they are great! We do not have all of the brackets attached for the bumpers yet, but right now one person can put the bumper on very quickly ( I haven’t timed it, but I would guess under a minute). We have a bolt sticking up that is permanently mounted to the frame, and the holes on the brackets on the bumper line up with them, so a wrench is not required to tighten the wing nut. I can post a picture after practice tonight.
