Thanks to everyone who came by today! The Casper chassis was finished today and tested successfully. A lot of organizing was also done in many different places including the pneumatics bins, the shelves and the wood room. Merry Christmas to everyone from the Green Hope Robotics Team!
12/19/15
Today we had a couple special visitors come and work with us! A couple members of Team 900 The Zebracorns helped us build an encoder breakout board. We also had Labview professional Doug Mcvey from KDY Automation come work with the programmers on Labview. Meanwhile the strategy team met for the first time for a strategy session. They were presented with the 2010 Break away challenge and managed to come up with a list of ideas for a capable robot and game play. The Mechanical Team also disassembled the shooter, built bearing mounts, worked with pneumatics and worked on finishing Casper. We had a very productive day and special thanks to the Zebracorns and Doug for helping us out today.
12/17/15
More great work was done today by the Engineering team. The programmers worked with Ti launch pads, sensors and Java libraries. The CAD team worked on the Chain in Tube Drive. The Mechanical Team built a wire shelf and worked on Casper’s chassis. The Electrical Team worked with wiring sensors and built 2 limit switches, 2 beam sensors and 2 metal sensors. Great work was done by all teams!
12/3/15
Great progress was made by the team today! The mechanical team tested the t-shirt cannon, attached axles to the shooter, worked on building the new chassis for build season, and assembled a drill press and arbor press. The programming team is working on reading binary files, vision processing and object tracking. Both teams faced some problems but were able to troubleshoot solutions. Good job today by all teams!
Shooters All Day
Right now the team has a T-shirt cannon under construction, two Nerf ball shooters, a Crowd FUNding campaign with only 2 weeks left, choreography and lyrics to learn for our ‘Talk Nerdy to Me’ parody of Jason Derulo’s ‘Talk Dirty to Me’. We are also making a safety animation video for a FIRST competition. The programmers are developing vision software for the upcoming season, and we have more members learning to program than ever before.We just put our new website up, and even a new blog post!
If you can’t tell, it’s a mad house over here at the Frontier.
Day 32 2/6/15
The team continued to execute on the tasks they created on Wednesday earlier this week. Looking forward to seeing a working Lofty by end of this weekend.
Cherry picker coming along..
Jason putting together motors..
Lofty is getting Friday Tender Love and Care. Hopefully by end of this week crane and all electronics back on.
Our programming team working hard to get the prototype teleop mode working.
Finally time to relax and chat.
Days 39-43
This is a cumulative blog for last 5 days of build.
Today on 2/17 at 7pm we bagged and tagged Lofty. But before closing the bags, we did a power on test and did small test of motors and arm, and all looked fine.
We had to open Bagged Lofty because we had to finish doing few things on it –
- Washers under the floor on the tower mount bolts
- Jam cherry picker axle so it turns with the arm
- Potentiometer installation and wiring (as much as we can)
- Talon SRX breakout installation and wiring
- Yellow Light installation
- More ballast
We had some parts ordered and they never arrived due to Snow & Ice. Hence we could not finish
– cable track installation on cherry picker (dangling wire)
– finish pot installation with coupling, electrical test for Programmer
Lofty statistics –
- Weighs around 100 Lbs; has an arm for lifting totes and a cherry picker for trash cans;
- Has 7 motors – 4 for driving, 2 for the crane arm and 1 for cherry picker;
- Has sensors more than fingers on my hand – encoders, limit switches, potentiometers, gyro, accelerometers, camera, Lidar sensros, and I am sure I cannot remember some.
- Has spent over 3000 Hours on designing and building Lofty and Ghost;
- Has software written in JAVA by our team to put the entire system into a functioning robot.
Last night 2/16
It was a snow day and night for most of us. Still we braved on and finished work on one of the ARM motors which was very hard to turn. Some ballast was also installed.
Work was also simultaneously done on Ghost parts & wiring. Yesterday also we bagged and tagged Lofty. But accidentally we left a battery in the bag.
Previous 3 days 2/13, 2/14 and 2/15 the entire team worked very hard to finish Lofty and Ghost as much as possible. Since we realized that Lofty will lockup and we may not have luxury of looking at Lofty again. There was a VEX FTC competition in Cary NC. Some of our mentors and students setup a concession stand at this event; refereed and performed as MC.
A basic PAWL design was also completed and along with the tower for Ghost. Clear plastic chain covers were also installed. Motors could not be installed on Ghost because gear boxes had some issues and some new parts had to be ordered.
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Days 36-38
This is a cumulative blog for the last three nights. Anyone can tell that pressure is building up on the build team as deadline is approaching closer. But just like gold shines up when heated, our team is beginning to shine up like gold.
The current status as of last night is that arm is almost done with two motors in. Cherry picker is also unit tested on Lofty. Almost all of electronics is in place. Pawl design restarted in real earnest.
The team has learned lots of lessons in the process of putting together Lofty –
- need for right tools – we spend a lot of time making incorrect cuts, and then recovering from them;
- extra spare parts for important tools – we all know what happens when band saw stops working;
- spare parts in general for robot – we spend time waiting for our parts to arrive
- Produce quality work no matter what –
Given the constraints we have the team is doing excellent. For last two evenings team has put in long hours and gotten Lofty almost ready for our programmers. I want to recognize students and mentors for their professional behavior all along. Thank You All!
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Day 35
The final product for the lift is coming close to completion, and with that we began to replicate it for Ghost, the second chassis.
Build has been devoted to finishing Lofty. They worked on attaching the second arm today, which will directly connect the extension arm that will be placed on top. A team has been working on the side to get the extending arm built, and another team has been working on the electronics. Progress was made in each area busybox pro apk . In addition to those main projects, side teams worked on our simple backup designs in case of emergency during competition and on developing the lift parts for Ghost.
The programming team was working with the prototype enhanced Ghost throughout today’s meeting. Once lofty has been complete, the build and programming teams will trade chassis so that programming gets to work on the real lift instead of the prototype and build can get started on replicating the lift for Ghost.
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Day 34
Like Day 33, today was an intense day too. Team worked hard today to finish Lofty, our production robot. Harness to install motors, crane arm are all in place. Build ran into couple of unplanned problems. But they were able to resolve all of them and push forward. As of 4pm today, Lofty was ready for cherry picker and chain install for the motors. Tomorrow they plan to put all electronics back on Lofty. Here are some of the pics which show the progress.
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