School and Solidworks

Today part of the engineering room was transformed into a film set. Several students (including our own Nick, Drew, and Moshe) participated in filming a video that the school plans to submit to an organization created by Steve Jobs to reform American public education.  After ranting about public school curriculums and making answering satirical questions our group focused on the Solidworks robot. Will and Jaret are working on the conveyor and shooter while Nick continues to push through the main robot.

This is a picture of a file of vex parts that comes with solidworks.

Heads Up

Today we tested out the quality and type of backboard we want for the competition and of course we have to test it with style. Henry putting his fingers and face on the line for some experiments with wiffle balls beamed at him. But the real purpose was to see where the ball would hit the backboard and come out.  

Been Steph Curry with the shot

Today we tested the shooter and the speed that balls leave the robot. With Jaret finally having the gears actually spinning all we are doing is make them spin faster so that the range can be larger. Also debates over whether we should attach a motor to the shooter to change the angle of it or just mount it in the angle we prefer and adjust the robot positioning to the angle. If you have any suggestions please leave a comment and we will take into consideration every idea, but also put into the fact that we only have a 12 motor limit. 

Going Up

Progress on the rack and pinion is in full force with trying to elevate the balls that are collected through the spinning collectors that direct the balls onto a platform that is attached to the rack and pinion.  Also just perfect calculations and the shooter fits in perfectly under the 18 inches height requirement. All that's left is to attached the platform to the rack and pinion and to attach the motors to the shooter and attach the shooter to the robot.

Progression

Today our team members took a survey for our school to help change our school for the better. Most of our members took about half the class to complete this survey because of the strong feelings on this subject. Also after we finished Jaret, and Will worked on the part that will raise the ball to the next level to be launched on our robot, this is shown above in the picture! Also we did get a little more coding done. 

The Ball Retriever

Today we finally got our ball retriever to work! It works by the two gears with paddles on them moving towards the robot. Then the ball is propelled into the robots chases as the ball touches the paddles, followed by being lifted up onto the second level where we will have the ball launched. Also today we figured that we will use two remotes to run the robot, so Nick and Moshe are working on coding the two remotes that we will end up using.

Going 3D

Today we finally started building upwards. And coding. We have Nick working on the SolidWorks, Moshe on the coding, Drew on the Blog, and the rest of the crew working on building the robot. Right now they are putting together every little piece that we will need to be able to put together our final robot. 

While we do that Moshe is coding all the ports for our motors that we will need to make every part on our robot work! So far everything is going smoothly without any fights or arguments. We try and implement everyone's ideas into the robot which seems to really help. Everyone in our group is loving being able to work with more people, which really maximizes our teams efficiency.