Mad-Eye is the culmination of one of the most difficult build seasons Gryffingear has ever seen. As a mentor, seeing my students work through countless roadblocks has been incredibly inspiring. I’m incredibly proud of this robot, but I’m even more proud of our growth over these past 4 years.
See Mad-Eye at San Diego, Sacramento, and Las Vegas.
Specs:
Drivetrain:
-6WD WCD 6x 4x2 Colson Performa
-WCP SS geared for 17 ft/sec
Intake:
-Over-the-bumper intake
-10:1 775pro
-Polycord power transmission to polybelt conveyor
-2" OD urethane tube roller
Hopper:
-Expanding hopper, max 60 ball capacity
-Custom 3D printed linear slides on 1" OD aluminum tubing - inspired by 118 2015.
-All polycarbonate and ABS structure.
Shooter:
-Turreted shooter riding on R3-1601-R3 bearing stackup, driven by waterjet cut 10DP gears.
-“Pre-shooter” wheel. 775pro 1:1 to AM 2" stealth wheel to accelerate fuel before contacting the primary shooter wheel.
-Primary shooter MiniCIM 1:1 to 2x 4x2 Colson Performa wheel. Driven by 3D printed HTD pulleys.
-Fixed shot angle.
Feeder:
-Polycord, polybelt, and 2" OD urethane tubing conveyor system.
That’s a nice looking robot you have there! Why the secrecy with your gear and climbing mechanisms?
I noticed in your video that someone was using a drill press while wearing work gloves. This is counter-indicated by OSHA because it poses an entanglement hazard. See the section “Safe Work Procedures.”
Look closer - that’s not 3-d printing, its the product of “alathemora”. (You don’t think that conjured was included in the definition of a FABRICATED ITEM as a joke, did you?)
Thanks for the kind words, everyone. Everyone on the team, students and mentors, worked really hard to improve our robot quality this year.
HTD pulleys on our shooter was 3D printed from ivory ABS plastic on the school’s uPrint SE Plus. We had two pairs of pulleys printed - 2x 24t 15mm wide (one hex bore, one 8mm CIM bore) spinning 1:1 with a minicim and 2x 18t 9mm wide(both hex bore) spinning 1:1 from a 775pro. Neither timing belt runs have given us any issues thus far. We’ve 3d printed numerous other parts on the robot without issues - linear slide blocks, round belt pulleys, spacers, and sensor mounts.
The primary reasoning behind printing these pulleys was so we could get a functional system running very quickly. Our waterjet turnaround is fairly quick and the 3D printer is located on campus, so for a lot of things it’s faster for us to produce it in house/with sponsors than it is to order them. I believe effective leveraging of resources is critical to the success of a team. If it makes sense to make it in house, we’ll make it in house.
Safety hazard noted. That student, and the rest, will get a refresher on machine safety this week.
We weren’t able to test the gear mechanism and climber as fully as we’d hoped. They will make their way onto Mad-Eye at San Diego.
Towards the end of build season, we realized that our system integration would make it quite difficult for us to process fuel at a good rate of fire. As we bagged the robot, we had difficulties even processing a constant stream of fuel, nevermind a fast stream of fuel. We played our first regional without a gear mechanism and a sub-par shooter, as our ranking and match performance showed. We tried to add value to our robot by playing strong defense, but we saw that without a gear mechanism, we were obsolete as far as the week 2 STEAMworks metagame was concerned.
After alliance selections at San Diego, we got to work on removing our fuel hopper, intake, and shooter systems to make room for a potential gear intake arm. We were able to add bearing blocks and mounting points before bagging the robot. We spent the next week prototyping, testing, and manufacturing a gear intake arm.
This is the robot as it was used at Sacramento. In a span of 2 weeks, we went from scoring 3-4 kpa per match and a 25% climb success rate to scoring 2-4 gears per match and a 79% climb success rate. Thanks to our partners 1323 and 1671, we participated in the first and only 4 rotor match of the regional. http://i.imgur.com/Uxuncpml.jpg
We expect to make a few more performance improvements for Las Vegas and Houston.
We were also at both SD and Sac, and the change in your robot performance was staggering. I walked by your pit and thought you’d somehow actually brought in an entirely different machine. Our scouting data mirrors the performance you mentioned. There was a big increase in gear scoring with an increase in climb reliability to match. This is a serious amount of innovation to have made in just a few days; leaps and bounds more than we were able to do.
As a final word, congratulations to your pilot. We were recording pilot skill in our scouting reports. Your pilot is the only one at the event to have scored a perfect 5/5 in every report. We were planning on giving out one of those pilot wing pins (from the airlines) as an award, but couldn’t get our hands on one.
Looking forward to seeing it in Houston to see what else you’ve improved on.
