2020 Build Season Week 4
Coming out of week three, there was a lot of work to be done, and throughout week four, the team was able to handle it well! Stress management came into play and everyone was able to keep a level head and accomplish a lot. We are working towards having a complete first robot soon, and it looks like we are set up to be getting that done in time.
Mechanical is split into their subteams, and each had a lot to finish so that it could be assembled soon. The winch system idea was finalized and the first prototype was finished and tested. This will get redesigned to fix and errors that were brought up through testing and then the final prototype will be built in the following week.
As far as the climber arm goes, the hook and hand was redesigned to better fit the chassis and work smoother. It was tested and the edits worked, now it runs up and down smoothly and quickly.
Finally, for mechanical, the conveyor and intake system made quite a bit of progress. It was cut out of polycarbonate and framed using bent metal sheets. The conveyor and intake were attached into one large piece, which took a lot longer than expected, but was completed none-the-less. The girls working on this also figured out a new method of connecting the poly-cord and tested it for a short amount of time. All of these mechanical subsystems are equally important pieces of the robot, and will all have to fit together perfectly.
Design had a large challenge coming into this week, when they had to consider the exact dimensions of how each of the mechanical subsystems will fit together. They needed to wrap up portions of final designs for the subsystems, mostly adding new changes that needed to be made. They also had to design the control panel subsystem. The control panel prototype has been redone multiple times, but hopefully this one is almost perfect! It is now just a simple set of wheels that attach to the side of the robot, and hopefully will prove effective. The final prototype should be done in week 5. Next, they put it all together to work on assembling the full robot CAD, which means finished small details about how everything will go together on the robot. All of these little details about how components fit together on the robot also had a lot to do with the E-Boards that have to go on the robot, which involved communications with electrical.
The electrical subteam has two E-Boards this year, a horizontal one and a vertical one. These take up some space on the robot, which means they affect the designs and the measurements take a lot of time. But, after much deliberation on how it would fit together, the vertical E-Board was finished and components were added that are going to support attachments. The horizontal E-Board was also worked on and the final decisions about placement on the robot were made. Finally, they cut out the final boards that are going to be used. As all of this was getting finished, the team is getting closer and closer to being test ready. This means, the programming team is running out of time before they hit the ground running!
To prepare for their heavy workload that is coming up, the programming team kicked into high gear to get all of their programs ready. They added more autonomous commands and tested them on simulators, and now they are all almost completed! The control panel code was also worked on, by adding rotation control and starting to program the robot to make decisions based on the color that the color sensor is on. There was also a rough version of hanger code added, but still needs more work in week five. And finally, programmers started communicating with the drive team to get a rough idea of button mapping. Of course, all of these programs are still awaiting proper testing on the final first robot, so their work has only just begun!
Finally, we brainstormed names for our robots and narrowed it down to the following pairs of potential names:
Nerfherder/Scruffy
X/Wing
Europa/Callisto
Organa/Amidala
The final name pair will be selected next week!
The team has completed a lot, but still has a long way to go! Girls of Steels determination is growing and building is progressing more and more each week. Soon, there will be a first robot driving around and a final robot on the way!
