For the past few years team 2980 has run as an open source team, posting everything we possibly could from CADD files to Code on chief delphi and our team website in order that other teams might benefit either from our successes, or from our mistakes, and we have had our fair number of both of those. This year things sort of got away from us time wise. We were so focused on building the robot that we didn’t get to post anything at all, and as the weeks flew by it became harder and harder to do any of that.
So, Here is our reveal video, and a link to a public google folder in which there are currently just a bunch of pictures of various parts of our robot. Over the next week we hope to get as much code and CADD posted as possible. We know it is too late for most, but perhaps somewhere out there there is a team that can benefit in some small way from our experiences this build season.
We are currently using a venturi. It is a pneumatic suction cup used in industrial robotics for lifting things.
We will be moving away from it before competition though. The way the venturi works is by blowing air past a whole at the top of the suction cup. This creates a vacuum in the cup, but requires a constant flow of air. We are simply losing too much air picking up the ball which requires a really long recharging before we can reliably fire the ball.
We found a shopvac at home depot. It is called a “bucket head”. It was about $20. When we opened it up we found that the impellor is held on with just one bolt and isn’t even threadlockered.
We haven’t gotten to test the new system yet, we will on Thursday night, our next meeting. I’ll post more about how it goes.
