Posted by Eric on January 31st, 2009
Here’s an update of what we did at NASA on Saturday 1/31/09:
We got the camera up and running, and it now tracks the pink and green trailer colors
Changed the design by adding in a few more rollers and decreased the angle of the slope
Had a successful test of the roller and shooter.
Cut the all the needed bumpers at the right angle
Cut and sanded all the L-brackets for the bumpers
Drilled the holes for the L-bracket pin
Measuring out the bumper length…
We tested out the camera’s color tracking abilities.
Assembling the hopper.
Screw fail! :
Posted by Eric on January 25th, 2009
Today we:
Finished the prototype’s wooden frame, except for the conveyor belt because we did not have enough surgical tubing
Attached the trailer hitch to the robot
Tested the robot with the trailer attached, consequently, turning the robot became much more difficult
Found that going backwards while attached to the trailer will be a challenge
Our second trip to NASA…
More prototype brainstorming…
We tested out or robot with the full trailer attached, and found out that its turning ability was……less than satisfactory…
Posted by Eric on January 24th, 2009
Things we accomplished at today’s meeting:
Built a wooden frame of the proposed design
Fixed both ToughBoxes, and found the solution of gluing in gear pins
Uploaded pictures and did some blogging
Programming team tested out various codes/commands
Figured out a method of connecting the surgical tubing
Bought 4 more Orbit Balls
All wired up!
Taking apart a board to use the wood for a prototype.
A fallen comrade.
Sanding down parts to use for the wooden prototype.
Posted by Eric on January 18th, 2009
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)
Posted by Eric on January 10th, 2009
Posted by Eric on January 3rd, 2009
Saturday January 3, 2009
We went to SJSU for the FIRST breakout, got informed of what the game was, and picked up our kit.
After we brought the parts back, we had our first FIRST meeting, where we basically checkout everything that was in the kit, and started to get familiar with all of the components.
We decided to start assembling the chassis using the given instructions. We mainly just wanted to get something working to check out all of the parts.
Jeff and Ryan began to get familiar with LabVIEW
The start of our team’s idea brainstorming.