We received our VEXpro chassis today and various other parts from VEX Robotics. This new line of off-the-shelf parts has been extremely useful this year.
We should have sprockets and wheels tomorrow and be able to do our first test drive. We are modifying the design pretty heavily to give us more room between the wheel wells. With the new size restrictions we have to be much more conscious about space.
Shooter development made huge progress today. We got in more Banebots wheels and now we have a very effective and compact two wheel shooter. This setup was able to shoot discs about 25 feet and this is by no means optimized. We’re hoping to have a 40+ foot max distance in case we need to feed another shooter. We’re using two Versaplanetary gearboxes. One is setup 10:1 with the BB550 motor and the orange wheels. The other is a BAG motor at 1:1 with the green wheels. We think the bag motor is still slipping so we may reduce it to 3:1. Hopefully we will be testing a bunch of motor/wheel/gear ratio combinations till we find the best solution. We really like how compact this shooter is.
We still have a few systems that really need development but the overall plan for the robot is coming together very nicely. Hopefully will have our first parts sent off to the laser cutter this week.
We constructed PVC goals today in the small space we have for field elements in our school. Soon we’ll have a full pyramid as well, though, since climbing has been shelved for a bit, we’re not in too much of a hurry.
– Spectrum
“When given a choice, choose the thing that scares you a little. If it’s 100% safe, it is holding you back.” – Jeff Atwood
