Bottoms Up

Done! End! Fin! The SolidWorks for the new robot's chassis is finally done! Know what that means? Me either. The new chassis is fairly similar to the one we used on last year's bot, since that one worked pretty well anyways. If it isn't broke, don't fix it; that's good news for our programmer at least, and the build guys have less to take apart now. You're welcome!

Chassis

The new chassis keeps the best aspects of the old one – including its 2:1 gear ratio for drive motors, which provided enough torque to move our monster of a bot faster than it probably should have been going – but boasts some improvements. For starters, it's only got one omni-directional wheel on either side, as opposed to two on the last chassis (which we changed because, during the finals, we kept getting pushed around by our opponents because our bot had no lateral grip). The plexiglass plate in the middle is new too; it's there to give us a place to mount our motor controllers and help de-clutter our wiring – a serious problem last season. The rest of the design was carried over from last year's bot. 

Prototype

After trial and error with examining the rings, we finally created a crude prototype for a mechanism to store and release the rings onto the rack.

If you like it then...

The rings for the FTC challenge arrived today, along with an interesting game of ring toss. Fun aside, we were finally able to examine the ring size, shape, and weights in order to design an effective grabber for them and begin prototyping.

Into The Grind

Continued to dissemble "Snooki". Decided to reuse Snooki's base for our new robot with some modifications to improve reliability and traction such as different wheels, better spacing, and cross support.

Snooki before

Plight of the Drafter

While the rest of the guys are busy dismantling poor Snooki, I've been given the all-important task of prototyping our new robot's chassis in Solidworks. Fun. Of course, that'd be a lot easier if I still had all the files from last year's robot – which I don't. Guess who's starting from scratch: Nik, that's who!!

The Next Generation

Nik begins work on the design of our next robot.

End of an Error

Began disassembling previous FTC robot, "Snooki", in order to begin work on new robot.

Great Rack

Completed construction of the center rack for the rings. Placed rack and wooden base into the field so the team could see the heights our robot would have to be capable of. Still need to paint base with white lines to match game designs. Continued brainstorming designs for robot.