Three's Company

In order to increase the power of our drivetrain, and decrease the number of burnt motors, Casey added a third motor to either side of the drivetrain. In order to stay under the limit of 8 motors, we had to remove the second motor from the linear slide to use it for the drivetrain, leaving the slide with only one motor. This decreased speed, but the slide could still rise and fall, and now the single motor can not produce enough torque to break the string, making it more reliable. With the third motor, the stress placed on each motor has been reduced considerable and torque has been slightly increased, making Sonic stronger and tougher.

Protect the tower!

We added reinforcement to the tower in order to increase it's stability and reduce the strain on our manual arm stop.  It'll be easier to score now since the tower will have less wobble to it.  The extra support also should help with autonomous and keep the autonomous ring stable and aligned.

Sometimes less is more

We used to have a beam running across right above where our brain is. However, we realized that it was causing the tower to twist and ended up being counterproductive, so we removed it.  Since it's removal the tower is aligned and it is now easier to score with our arm.

The Mighty Axle ...

 

... Is not so mighty.  The axle we used for the arm got twisted ... again.  Therefore, we replace the axle (yet again). 

For wheeling

Nik is building a new drive train for Sonic which will give us better control and will help prevent the motors from burning out

Two is better than one

The gears were having problems meshing properly with each other (they weren't fully aligned and would occasionally slide past each other).  We therefore added (and painstakingly aligned) two (2) more gears to the problem area to solve this.

Covering All Our Bases

Since the encoders starting behaving again, it looks like we'll be spending the next few days trying to expand our autonomous code. More specifically, we're trying to get code ready for both starting posistion and all IR locations. From what I understand, Casey is using a program chooser and the IR sensor to run different codes, or something. It's not my cup of tea; I'm just the one who gets to reset the robot after every run.

Fixing Autonomous

Despite Sonic's great performance at Western, the qualifier showed us just how broken our Autonomous mode really was. Out of all our matches, we only scored autonomous rings a few times, and, even though we were the only autonomous score the judges had seen all season, I know we can do better. I'm going to have to work with the encoders to try and get Sonic to score more consistently.