Build Season Day 6

Today we continued work on the prototype robot including the mounting of the tough boxes and the electronics board. We (aka Aren) downloaded coded and at the end of the meeting we were able to drive the bot around (strafing, driving, and pinning). However, one set of motors seemed to be having some issues, but we ran out of time to positively determine what said issues were. We will all try driving it tomorrow/this weekend.

Action Items:

Drive/chassis system:
Figure out what's wrong with that one set of motors.
Figure out why the signal light wasn't doing anything.
Watch where the center of gravity is. (i.e. check that the battery is centered)
Work out any remaining bugs in the code.
DRIVER PRACTICE!
Complete our analysis of drive train options and continue moving towards a completed frame design that we can send off to be welded together.

Arm system:
More CADing!
Current design ideas include:
elevator and a (shorter-ish) arm
double jointed arm (more like an arm and an articulated wrist)

Gripper system:
More CADing! And probably 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

You may be wondering... The Minibot is kind of on the back burner for now. While it is a lot of points, we don't have a whole lot of people to split off and focus on that right now. Because of this, we are considering pulling in MSA students from FLL to work on this, as a way to get them involved, get this task done, and keep the team alive. We also plan to commit our own efforts to this a little later when some of these more important details (we think) are figured out. And it is part of the Withholding Allowance, so if worst comes to worst we'll do it after Ship.