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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