12.21.2012

Coming Soon To a Theater Near You

Thanks to the industriousness of Nik, we finished our mid-season video for out robot. While we could describe it here, we think the video should speak for itself...


12.18.2012

Shoot to Thrill

Now that our first match is over and gone, we're shifting our focus away from our robot and onto our Mid-season video, a three minute video that documents our achievements with our robot as well as the unity and charity of our team. We have many areas to cover - Design, Strategy, Fundraising, etc. - which must now be focused and condensed. Our plan for the video is for each part to be a channel on a television, though the hard part is to film.

12.17.2012

How The Western Was Won

To put it mildly,


Last Saturday was our first official First competition at Western High School, and as you can see, it was a great day for our team and our robot. We competed in 6 matches throughout the day and came out on top in all of them, to no lack of challenge from the opposing alliances. One matches opponent would be the next matches partner, so in the end we made many new friends and shared many ideas about strengths, weaknesses, and ways to improve. The competition also put Sonic into the firing line for the first time, and while he accomplished his goal, we discovered many flaws in the heat of battle that we can now improve before our next match, such as dropping rings and missing autonomous scores. By earning first place, we hope this match will be the trend for the remaining season, not only in our teams performance but in our enjoyment of the event and the friends we made there. 

12.12.2012

It's the Final Countdown!


Sonic is nearing completion, just in time for the start of round one this Saturday.  There are only a few things more left to do; practice, double-check structural integrity, debug autonomous code, and include sponsors.  For the most part though every thing is complete, so without further ado, Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, Sonic.


Reaching out

Today, we were visited by FAU and helped them with their robot. Casey helped them out with their programming and ensured the robot was running properly, while the rest of us shared knowledge and helped to improve each others designs. At the end of the day we even had a mock tournament with Sonic vs. their robot

Brains ... and a battery mount

We've constructed a nice, cozy container to contain our brain and battery, allowing for easy access while protecting them at the same time.

It's always the small ones ...

The lift system was very effective, but we noticed that we would have a problem with the arm jerking when we tried to extend it from neutral position.  Upon closer inspection of the arm we found this:
This small piece of plastic, not even an inch in length or half an inch in width, was the root of all evil ... at least for our arm anyways.  A simple removal of this piece has resulted in optimal performance of the arm and less strain on our lift system.

12.10.2012

Shields Up!

In light of our recent acquisition of sponsors – as well as the need to display our team number – we plan to construct a frame for our robot, where we'll mount two big sheets of plexiglass. 

This serves two ever-useful functions: first, it gives us a place to put our sponsor(s) logo(s); second, it gives us a shield to prevent other robots from damaging our robot's insides; third, now we can put Sonic on Sonic. 

As a side effect, we also now have a place to put the brain and battery where there easily accessible; I took the liberty of drawing that up in SolidWorks too. 



12.07.2012

Autonomous Ring

In the interest of speed and efficiency, we decided to create a separate holder for the autonomous ring.  This holder allows three things to be accomplished: simpler coding, placement of the ring, and ideal positioning.  The slight advantage this gives may not seem like much, but it adds up.


12.06.2012

Improving the End Effector



The old end effector design, while good, was not as efficient as we wanted – it worked beautifully, but being the perfectionists that we are, we wanted to do even better.  We decided to slightly alter the shape of the end effector, which should allow it to secure the rings even better.


It is still a prototype, but the results so far have been promising.

Casey's New Toy

Today, we finally got the shipment of IR Sensors that we'd been waiting for, and the team is rightfully excited. Unfortunately, the only thing standing in the way of Casey and his new toy was the mandatory prototyping we do before sticking it on. So in lieu of being hounded to death by the general populace, I quickly drew us a simple mount for the sensor. It's not pretty,  but it gets Casey off my case and onto the computer, so I call that a win!