Team 2733, the Pigmice, are proud to present our 2019 off-season WCD and outreach fuel shooter, with drivetrain inspiration drawn in part from 3476, 1619, our own experiences, and (of course) 254. This is our team’s first time manufacturing and using custom drive gearboxes, and they have worked quite well so far.
The overall WCD drive has also worked quite well so far, although we have improvements to make with bumpers and bumper mounting for the season, along with a few other minor improvements to manufacturing.
We also decided to design and build a 2017 Steamworks fuel shooter, as our team did not have a driving robot for nearly all of that season, and we wanted experience with flywheel shooters before the season, as that is the main area our current team is inexperienced in.
We plan to continue work on the shooter and hopper in addition to constructing an intake after the 2020 season, preparing for outreach events. As of right now, the hopper functions, but requires non-ideal quantities of cardboard and duct tape, and is not competitively efficient (although for outreach it will work)
.https://www.chiefdelphi.com/uploads/default/original/3X/b/d/bd762eaa27a2a003eb1ab13774f245503945241d.mp4
The full assembly render (although a bit messy) and parasolid files are attached, and I’m happy to answer any questions.
Looks great, excited to see what you bring to the field in 2020!
This right here is why I always advocate for teams to build one in the off-season before you try to do it for competition, there’s ALWAYS stuff to tweak. Each team has unique manufacturing and build capabilities and team priorities (cost, performance, serviceability, space, etc.).
Would you care to share more specifics on what you would improve on the 2nd go-around?
Firstly, we did not oversize our bumper wood enough - we had the same problem in the main season and re-cut our wood several times, but we didn’t document the lengths that ended up working. 1/8" more room than the frame (1/16" on each side) for this robot was not enough, so for the main season we’ll do 3/16"-1/4".
Secondly, our bumper support rails need to be supported at the corners of the frame with a piece of churro or 8020. This hasn’t been a problem yet, but I already notice visible bending when I pick up the robot by the bumper rails, and this robot has gone through far less wear than a competition robot will.
In terms of manufacturing, I felt that the process was rather rushed in general. We definitely have a solid process worked out with our waterjet sponsor and our in-house manufacturing, but we ended up needing to drill holes on the assembled robot more often than I would have liked, and a lot of the work was done by just a few people (although we have more engaged and capable rookies than we have in any other year I’ve witnessed).
Is there any videos you can post of the indexing or performance of the shooter system? It looks very clean and a relatively simple and effective design, very cool! Thank you for posting.
We will probably work on that more next off-season, we haven’t been able to work on it much recently because of winter break and after that we will be busy with the main season.
