Today’s meeting of team 4611 began with advice from educator Vince DeTillio. He explained to us the difference between how experts think and how novices think. Experts don’t give up and have the ability to get unstuck. While building our robot we want to make sure we think like experts by exercising self-control and analyzing ideas before we dismiss them. Ozone also gained inspiration from the most recent Robot in 3 Days video. Engineers on RI3D Teams are currently testing gear grabbers, shooters, and rope climbers and mounting them on to their robot.
Our collective goal for this week is to have 3 working sleds and drive stations: two new prototype sleds with omni wheels, one with pneumatics, plus the competition robot from last year. In order to do this, the team broke up into electrical, fabrication, coding, drive, design, and drafting teams.
The electrical team broke up into 2 groups and each group began to build a max metal board for the 2 new prototypes. This was also an opportunity to teach new members basic robotic electrical work such as how to make victors and strip wire and teach them where tools are located in the woodshop. Fabrication, drive team, and electrical team members worked together to take apart last year’s prototype robot so the team can use the parts to make prototypes this year.
Returning drive team members worked with coders and fabricators to update the drivers station software and fix the wooden stations themselves. Coders also updated software on their personal computers for the new season and explained to new members how we communicate with the robot at competition. Along with updating software, a new repository was created on github to store and share all new coding files.
The drafting team captain explained to new members how to save files to Ozone’s flash drive and had them experiment with the program Solidworks. The team found dimensions for game pieces and physical parts of the arena such as the airship using the game manual and FIRST forums. The gear and wiffle balls are currently being created in Solidworks.
After introductions, the design team cataloged part numbers that the team will need to order for this year. They created a material list for the hopper, boiler, and airship. Unlike the drafting team, the design team works mostly with pencil and paper to map out ideas for prototypes they eventually test.
Fabricators not only continue to work on perfecting the rope climbing mechanism but have also constructed a pneumatic pump system to shoot wiffle balls. Other fabrication team members worked on building omni wheels for the 2 new chassises and the frame for the chassises themselves.
team4611.org 