Here is our robot as of a couple days ago. We painted it today and have to put the fabric on the bumpers still but we are almost done. Our robot’s name is “Elevader” and is now painted matte black.
Our shooter doesn’t shoot very far because we didn’t have a powerful enough motor, but it works well enough.
Our ball collector is made of PVC and some polycord and balls then go into a hopper which feeds them to the shooter via a wheel and a window motor.
We have a 4 wheel drivetrain and two other wheels that aren’t being driven powered by 4 CIM motors.
This was our first test of our robot and we are all pretty excited to have something working. It’s been a long stressful 6 weeks.
Some of the other robot’s I’ve seen on the forum are amazing, we hope to get there someday.
We probably wouldn’t have gotten the thing coded without the help of this forum, so thanks to anyone who gave me some help and feedback!
Thank you to our generous sponsors: JCPenny, NASA, MTSI, and JR Gear Landscaping!
Careful with those bumpers. I know they’re not finished yet but make sure you realize you are currently in violation of [R31]:
Joints between Bumpers and the radial projections of corners must be filled with pool noodle material. Examples of implementation are shown in Figure 4‑6.
Look in the manual under that rule, there’s a diagram of what is allowed and what is not. Your bumpers appear to be identical to the “NOT OK” diagram. Essentially, you need to fill in the gaps at the corners. It’s pretty easy, just glue/double-stick-tape/ziptie a small piece of noodle, with hole looking up, to the edge of one of your bumpers on all sides. Again, look at the diagram. The inspector might let it slide for a rookie team, but I wouldn’t count on it, and since you haven’t put on the fabric yet it should be an easy fix right now.
Make sure you test drive it on carpet! That’s where you’ll be competing, and sometimes it happens that rookies(and veterans) forget to do so until the first match, only to find out they have too much lateral traction and they can’t turn. Again, much easier to fix now than at competition, you usually just replace the frontmost, backmost, or all wheels with ones with less traction. If you dropped the center, you should be fine.
EDIT: If need be, replace the non-powered wheels first.
All in all, looking really good- you both move, AND can score!
haha you are pronouncing it wrong. its a compound word between Elevator and Vader. The reasoning behind this is our ball collector mechanism works a little like an elevator bringing the balls off the ground and then dropping them in the hopper.
Yeah we noticed the problem with our bumpers after we put them on and are working on making the corners rounded. Thanks for the reminder though!
And yeah I was going to test it out on carpet tomorrow just to make sure we can turn. Our forward wheels are omniwheels and we have the center wheels dropped so we should be ok I think.
Yeah I’ve been suggesting that and we haven’t gotten around to it. What would you suggest? I just said we should put a piece of lexan in front of the electronics connected to the plywood that the jaguars are on… That would at least protect them from anything hitting from the sides and its a pretty small gap to get in from the top so a ball couldn’t get in and mess anything up.
Get some 1/8" Lexan and angle it up towards the frame of your hopper. Maybe move the Jaguars closer together so you can use less Lexan. That should be enough to keep most prying arms out of the Jags, but it won’t be terribly hard to remove in a hurry if you need to replace a Jag.
You all should have brought it over to the mall this weekend and practiced with it. We have a huge carpeted area with our hoops, bridge and barrier all set up for practice. its open tonight if you want to come over.
you may want to look in to buying a bunch of yard sale signs with blank backs then attaching velcro to them and your bot, word side down. You can attach stickers to them, they are cheap to get and will be a source of endless in-jokes.
