Prototyping – Day 4

Tuesday was our first “official meeting” after kickoff. We started it off with a quick rules quiz by mentor John Griffith. Our students are awesome and read the rules thoroughly, so we knocked this out quickly.

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We took care of the requisite chores such as doing inventory on our kit of parts.

Senior Brandon and Sophomore Juan make quick work of Kit Inventory
Senior Brandon and Sophomore Juan make quick work of Kit Inventory

Moving on to more robot related tasks, our team began discussing what we wanted to prototype. There is clearly a large challenge related to drivetrain this year, and one of our first tasks is identifying candidate drivetrains and doing some quick prototyping on our existing drivetrain.

Team Captain Richard discusses drivetrains with Alberto and Lily. Steven sports his FRC1860 jersey from 2014.
Team Captain Richard discusses drivetrains with Alberto and Lily. Steven sports his FRC1860 jersey from 2014.
Prototype DT getting prepped for 8" pneumatic wheels (arrive Thursday) and testing bumping heights
Prototype DT getting prepped for 8″ pneumatic wheels (arrive Thursday) and testing bumping heights

We also know that some form of an intake and some form of a shooter are subsystems we would like to consider before starting to finalize our list of robot actions we plan to design to this season. We know the drivetrain is possibly the most critical element for both its necessity to breach defenses (guaranteed points and ranking points). Intake should be a close second, as a well designed intake could also serve double duty as a low goal scorer and manipulator. A high goal shooter is certainly a possibility as well. We know the “alpha teams” will have the capability. However, we are also concerned with our ability to execute an accurate/fast enough shooter given the properties of the game piece, the shot distances required to be useful, the presence of defense, and the size of the target.

All that being said, shooters are just cool. We threw together a shooter that contacts the ball from one side, as well as what was originally an intake prototype that somehow morphed into a shooter by the end of the day. Neither one blew us away, but its a start.

 

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