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Monday, January 17, 2011

Build Season Day 8

We started out by talking about different arm/elevator/lifter methods and have come up with 2 or 3 favorites that we are CADing. We made a spreadsheet of our ideas along with a rough ranking system.

Then we had a fundraising meeting. We still need money if we want to go to the Championship and lots of people now have volunteered to ask various companies for money. We are lucky to have the first $2000 we raise matched.

We decided to drive the prototype around again to show it off and get some more practice with it. In the process, the camera power cord (which had been disconnected from the '10 robot's camera, but not from the electronics board (i.e. it was floating around loosely)) ended up on the power source from the power distribution board. The cable got very warm and melted some of its plastic and is no longer usable. Everything else is fine. Then we decided that we should finalize our chassis frame so we could send it to Loftech to weld. This led to a discussion of how to support the arm which led to another discussion of arm designs. So we will try to have the different versions of the arms CADed ASAP. A small group of "design representatives" so to speak are planning a trip to Loftech to discuss our design with them.

Things to do:
Drive/chassis system:
Work out any remaining bugs in the code.
DRIVER PRACTICE!

Arm system:
More CADing!
Current primary design ideas include:
2 stage elevator (probably pneumatics) and a (shorter-ish) rotating
arm
a multi stage elevator similar to Team 25's from 2007 and a
fixed gripper

Gripper system:
More CADing! Or maybe some prototyping....
Current design ideas include:
powered wheels on the top and rollers on the bottom
powered wheels on the top and the bottom
a pneumatic grabber of some sort
the "Pez dispenser" design

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