FIRST Robotics Report 2023 - Over the Edge

I've basically lost track of time.  I guess we started the week with 10 sessions left to go.  It might be more accurate to call it 12 because Saturdays are double sessions.  Mostly it is software fussing around with the robot.  Hardware and software need to work together.  If a mechanism is janky it is difficult for software to tune it up.  And one supposes vice versa.

At the start of the week we had to pull a motor unit from the practice robot for the competition machine.  So the drivers had a night of....not driving.  They spent it in strategy sessions.

Lots of things to "game".  How do you salvage something from being on an alliance that is hopelessly overmatched?  How about when you have the strong partners and your vision of how to work together is at odds with them?  Diplomacy and working together are very important in a complex competition like this one.  By the way this is a game in the true sense.  That's a 20 sided D & D dice with a list of various types of teams we might encounter.  They vary in many ways....

Side jobs.  We built a work table for the pit out of junk on hand.

Hopefully we have both robots up and running for drivers to practice with in the very near future.  Ugh....Mondays.

Many small tasks finished up on Tuesday.  We are starting to "stand down" most of our fabricators for a well earned break.  Software put in a long, hard day and at the end of it the competition robot came cruising down the hallway holding a game piece.  Still much work to do, but it was fun to see one of our drivers take the controls and make it fly......

So Thursday was looking quite optimistic.  Robot put together, basic software commands installed.  Time to drive it.  But then..things happened.

One drive module had a loose bearing.  That was easy.  But two other mechanical elements caused trouble, one making nasty grinding noises and the other heating up and seizing up.  This is not good.  Better one supposes with a little bit of time left to fix things, but every revision robs our drivers of practice time.

Our pit crew is getting good experience, so there's that......

I spent all day Friday thinking dark mechanical thoughts.   One system that did not totally fail but made some horrid pre-fail noises was this:

It's a gear motor with a 90 degree bevel gear driving the arm directly.  It had the power to do so but with how far down it was geared the final gear in the series was only moving about 45 degrees.  And those teeth needed a dentist!  So in the course of our Saturday session we built this:

Chain and sprocket drive.  Much smoother and the shaft does a bit more than a 360 rotation so the gear wear should be even.  We'll be doing a bit of tweaking and tightening but it is a much better system.  We also shored up the winch assembly.  It had issues.

So, most of the woes of Thursday resolved and we can give it back to software for a couple of sessions.  Oh, you might think the shaft in the above picture is a bit long.  It is.  So to alarm the team member who frets and obsesses over aluminum Death Rain getting down into her precious electronics we posed a photo of one of our Build Leads getting ready to unleash a shower of angle grinder sparks!  (note, he did not actually cut it this way).

Probably we'll have a couple more ups and downs in the week ahead.  We'll have one more long Saturday session to tune it up and drive it around.  Then off to tournament play....