FIRST Robotics 2023 Report - Week Four

After a breakthrough session last Saturday a week of tweaking and shoring up.  

Monday

Moved the mast supports further apart and added external framework.

Put bearing blocks on the upper part of the "mast" and a mock up of the extendable arm.  Also our mascot.  This was for a test of the braking system for the winch.  And it worked, solving our last known engineering issue.*

Tuesday

Busy day.  Among other things a tour going through our work area.  We had 30 kids on seven or eight different tasks.  We got the extendable arm mounted and established that we would not need a braking system on it.  The grabber claw is in a useable state but we are 3D printing  nylon insets for the aluminum grabber bars and awaiting new cylinders.  The ones shown here were pulled from a scrap bin at one of our sponsors and one of them leaks.  

I am lobbying for putting the drive motors on temporarily, I understand there are coding issues to solve but the test base will remain intact for those.  We also have one more motor to mount and several systems to optimize.  I think the end of day Thursday pictures will be a good approximation of final form.   As we are right about at the half way point in the season....our design appears to work.

Thursday

Did not put drive motors on today.  Frame got several upgrades to strengthen it.  We also improved the winch spool and mounted a capable iteration of our grabber onto the frame.  I'm a big believer in real world testing, so with the robot on blocks to match wheel height we used the grabber to pick up and put down on all the necessary levels.

We made protective side panels for the robot.  We do not want our electronics getting bashed if somebody's arm twitches out of control.  As these are the temporary panels the team indulged themselves with signatures and cartoons.

Robot base sitting in the storage closet.  Saturday we put on the motors, bumpers and get a start on the electronics.  A solid piece of work.

Saturday

Quite a bit got done, and the quality of construction is solid.  Here's the drive base with drive motors and battery mounted, super structure shored up, mast now attached to winch.  The adult helping is a motor cycle enthusiast.  I had to tease him a little, asking if the robot had more black with silver studs than the gear he wears to Sturgis!

Build and software are progressing at about the same pace.  The latter seem to have debugged the drive code and have the autonomous balance routine back in operation.  The math for presetting arm locations based on rotary encoders looks interesting.

A new problem became apparent today.  The arm is rather bouncy, which will make some operations slower.  Not that you should be driving around with it extended in any case.  So various combinations of gas shocks, bungees etc were tried.  Here's one test with weight attached.

This, alas, was working against too much resistance and resulted in grumpy noises and smoke from the arm motor involved, so we will have to solve this next week.  Back at it Monday with fresh ideas and hopefully with several parts that are "stuck" in the Supply Chain somewhere.  With luck we solve the bouncing,  attach the grabber and get all the electronics on by Thursday.

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* I jinxed with the "known problem" statement.