DAY 2
Most of our day was dedicated to fabricating the elevator for climb. Unloaded, it works very well, we have not yet tried moving it with a load. We have, however, hung from it to test our hook strength and they did not appear to warp. We still don’t know if our overall climbing mechanism will work as we still have to add our rotating arms. Hopefully, we can get that done today.
Our rollers for the elevator were made using custom brackets. The overall design of them was inspired by the vex elevator examples found here. Custom making them allowed us to have a smaller clearance between stages, but the brackets that vex provides are a great alternative for teams that cannot custom make brackets.
We built our intake (didn’t really prototype it first) and it initial trials worked really well. We have not yet tried driving around to pick up cargo from different angles. Overall, overhead rollers seem to pull these balls in very efficiently and easily over the frame of the chassis (depending on its height).
Space on the robot is still of great concern if we are climbing and shooting…it might be a viable strategy for some teams to just build a really good climbing bot.
Day 2 Videos:
Intake
Climber
Also, a quick shoutout to AndyMark for sponsoring us this year. Something small, but they sent us their spacer kit which has been incredibly helpful to quickly and accurately achieve the right spacings. Definitely recommend every team have an assortment like that instead of cutting spacers. We’ll also be using their Redline Motors for our climb in combination with a 100:1 and 48:1 sport gearbox.