Evergreen Valley High School EVHS Robotics – The Prototypes

This meeting, most of our team went to a workshop at NASA, where we had more tools and resources to build our robot. We accomplished the following:

• Solved the problem with the ToughBox (a few of the gears had to be flipped over in order to be flush with one of the sides)

• Changed the chassis to a short and wide design

• Cut the frame and make it so that the middle would have a space for the orbit ball

• Solved the chain alignment problem with a new chain, added a few new gears, and washers

• Attached chains from two motors to all four wheels

• Cut and secured the wooden base to mount the electronics/control system

• The code has been modified to work with two separate joysticks. One for each of the two motors, thus enabling a “tank drive” option

• Wrote in the ability to slowly speed up the robot even if you throttle the control stick all the way forward or backwards.

James and Mr. Kuo working on putting together the new short and wide frame.

The completed base frame.

We also were able to look at past robots and acquire some ideas for our design. A few options we had in mind were:

• Have a rotating bar in the front to collect the balls, a conveyor belt the balls up to a holding space at the top of the robot and either

• Shoot the balls out like a tennis ball shooter

• Use a “hopper” idea where we dump all the balls into the trailer

• Use gravity to have the balls slide down and into the trailer

• Use some sort of pneumatics pump to push the balls out (might be too slow/not enough force to do this idea though)