Day 25, 26, & 27: CAD and Intake

The first of the robot parts were sent to our sponsor on Tuesday and we should be getting them back tomorrow or Monday.

Intake

We have continued working on the intake and refining it.

FRC#558 Elm City Robo Squad put together a cool tutorial video on making parts by tracing a 1:1 print out of the CAD model. If you are looking for a way to make an intake like ours without a router this is a pretty solid solution.

We have played with various wheel configurations and now we are working on tuning pulley diameters and gear methods. We know we want the motors to lay flat so we'll need to remove the VPs or use some form of 90 degree adapter. There are lots of gearing options for getting to 90 degrees or making the package small we just have to find the one we like best and fits our packaging.

Climber

We think we have a solution for managing the rope of that will be attached to our tailgate climber when we need to lift a partner. It uses a high extension ratio spring to keep the rope length manage when the arm telescopes during the match and when we go to climb the spring retract up near the hook to allow us to winch the cable. Rope and wire management on a rotating and telescoping arm has taken a lot of thought and we are sure that we will be making many modifications and iterations until we get it right.

Drive Train

We've started making the first real parts for the robot on the lathe, mostly just standoffs and spacers at this point but it's still exciting that real parts are getting made. We also sorted, bagged, and inventoried all the parts for both robot drive trains. We still have a few parts to order but nothing that should slow us down too much.

Timeline

We feel a little behind a lot of teams but we also have to remember that even though FIRST claims it's a "6 week" build season that is factually false. It's 45 days and we don't compete until week 3. So even though tomorrow is the end of week 4, we still have 19 days until End of Build season, and 40 days until Lone Star Central where we can be working on the practice bot and withholding allowance items. 40 days is long time and we have 79 days until the end of our season on the Saturday of Houston Champs. Lots of time to build, program, iterate, and improve our team and machine.

- Spectrum

"The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady accretion." - Alexander Graham Bell