Robot building seasons have ebbs and flows, tides and landscapes. The middle weeks get hectic, so I'm out of my usual Friday reporting mode.
I've mentioned more than once that a quarter century of doing things like this has given me the ability to "see" roughly two weeks into the Robot Future. Oh, you think this is a good thing? Trust me, its a curse.
I spent most of last week looking at work in progress and work projected and thinking....well that won't work. Mostly due to weight limits. The robot can only weigh 115 pounds this year. And as its various components were being worked on separately I got more and more antsy. Yes, I encouraged them to weigh things every session, but they found that a bother. It would would get in the way of adding more cool things, bolting them on, wiring them up, maybe adding just one more motor or gearbox. Nobody likes to listen to elderly eccentrics. But I told them it looked to me like about 106 pounds without all the wiring and more critically without a sizable - but non mission critical - subsystem.
Eventually they got tired of hearing me whine and put it on the scale. Which read 106 pounds.
It'sfine. The main systems have proven to be more versatile than expected, rendering the auxiliary subsystem (and it would have been about another 20 pounds!) unnecessary. We can now proceed with a simpler, more robust, "cleaner" design, which admittedly still needs quite a bit of tuning and tweaking.
Heading into that always crucial long Saturday session, here's what we had:
Main assembly, elevator and grabber. It's mounted on a temporary base that approximates the right geometry.
And the actual drive base. Nice omnidirectional drive modules and most of the electronics. The latter appear to be floating in mid air, but that's because they are mounted on nice, clean polycarbonate plastic. It will look scruffy and Mad Max soon enough. Maybe I like this view so much because until the scruffification you can imagine the electronics just floating (weightlessly, boy I wish!) on thin air.
Bring it on, Saturday.....
Well that's pretty fun. Very speedy and more importantly, easy to control. The one remaining subsystem to Prove is the "elbow" on the main manipulator. We had it running briefly until it drew too much current and fried a wire connector. We are going to lighten it a bit and increase the gear reduction on the motor that drives it.
From the early part of the season there had been a plan to have a ground intake device. Alas, finally putting the robot on the scale it became clear that the mechanism as designed would put us over weight. But...could you make a really simple, really light, really dumb device that could do most of the job? Let's find out.
And so it goes. We don't have everything working, but a lot of it. We expect to have it all working together in about a week. Enough time, but none to spare. We just have to avoid any cancellations due to weather. Fingers crossed.
