FIRST Robotics 2024 - Love and Robots

We had to fight a bit to get the weight back under 125.  It was an all hands on deck, productive session and at the end of it everything back on the scale....

That allowed the next step, and a fun one it was.  Final assembly.  The drive base and the manipulator system got together just in time for Valentine's Day.

Both the CIAO/heart caption and the lurid tone of red were added by my phone for some reason.  I'm concerned that it is both whimsical and evidently self aware...

Alas, the Relationship had some issues at this point.  When the arm was rotated down there was about a quarter inch of interaction between systems.  This required various cutting, trimming and moving about that cost us more Time.  And Time is precious.....

OK, one more session got everything mechanical back where it should be.  So here's the final form of the robot which has been dubbed Helios in keeping with the peculiar H-series.

As you might recall, in competition robots wear either red or blue bumpers.  We have a multi-colored set for practice purposes, keeping the competition bumpers pristine.  It should also be noted that this is the robot in its compact mode, that's a three stage elevator on a pivot, waiting to be extended nearly four feet.

Will it work?  Well, 16 motors each with its own speed controller. 7 chain and sprocket systems.  Six major mechanisms, each of which has been proven to work in isolation....will they play nice together?

At the end of day Sunday it's still not known.  The wiring on this thing is brutal.  Our first robot in 2016 had 6 motors.  Each with two wires, so....12.  13 with the mostly useless camera we had back then. This monster is mostly using three wire brushless motors, so I think the total of power wires alone is 48.  Plus lots more sensors, cameras and encoders.  I bet there will be close to 100 wires that have to all be done right before we compete.

In about ten days...