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. 

The Robot awakens

Today we are finishing up the drive train which will practically complete our chassis and get us moving to the difficult part of how we will pick up our wiffleballs. Our team was thinking about making a sort of elevator to lift up the balls in order to shoot them out in a more controlled manner.
We are also building the mechanism that will shoot the balls to the goal. Our solid works specialist is also getting along quickly with our bot making it look perfect for our team!

This is our chassis so far and its almost exactly what we have in solid works down below!

The Trials

Today we are working on trial and error with our design for our launcher. We are planning on creating a design similar to how football launchers work. There are two or more wheels rotating, we will be placing the ball between the rotating wheels which in theory should consistently shoot he ball to where we want it to go. We are currently looking at how many materials we will need to complete this process and if we have the materials. Also our solid works specialist is working on designing our robot chassis including the wheels, motors, and axles.

The Awakening

Today we finished updating our blog with the profiles of all the new team members. Also we finished taking apart our bots. We now have one chest of all of the internal components (motors, gears, shaft collars...), and another bin filled with the structural components (flat metal, bars...) so we can eventually incorporate them into our robot. And as you can see we started to build a few models to see what exactly what design we will use and which design will work the most effectively.

A New Hope

Today our heroes are starting different aspects of our new challenge.  Nick and Drew are working on re-doing the blog from "Hot-Bot" to the "Wolffe Pack".  Will, Jaret, and Briston are finishing up dismantling our old robots and all members are brainstorming different methods for accomplishing the task of launching wiffle balls into a cooler.  Based on the ideas we have discussed already, we are pretty excited to get into full-swing with our engineering marvel.  Our R&D department is pretty excited about this one.
After all this there is a chance to restore peace to the galaxy as it was a LONG LONG TIME AGO...

Hot Bot's End :(

It is sad to say that we have to take apart hot bot :( Yesterday we were given a new assignment, which means we have to take apart our old robot. We also chose new teams, our team now consists of Drew, Moshe, Nick, Jaret, Will, and Briston. We are super excited to start working. Our new team is very hard working and full of ideas! But for now we are just throwing some ideas around while we disassemble our robots.

Finding better traction!

We finally get to do our competition on the tables. Last week we won the outdoor challenge, but this week we are going to run into a little challenge. We need better traction, our wheels were designed for our outdoor competition on asphalt. Now we need rubber wheels to stick to the tables, which is what we are working on today.

Today we are revamping our robot slightly for next Tuesday when we have the competition indoors and on tables! We had a successful competition day on Wednesday where we had a rocky start but ended winning every other match. We were crowned the best vex robot in the class, but we'll see what happens on Tuesday!

Challenge Time

After finishing our solidworks bot, we can't wait to get to the competition. Our group is confident we'll do well, although there are some traction issues we should work on.  We may ask another group for a cem kit or figure out a less complicated fix.  However, we think a better idea is to use the large omni-directional wheels that are the front 2 wheels in the following pictures.

Ready to rock and pull!

This week we have completely finished our robot. This means we have our mounts and even bricks for weight (which we gave our own decals).  We also used a broken brick as a tail fin for aerodynamics, since we're traveling at such high speeds. ; )

Finishing touches

This week we are just about ready to start scrimmaging opponent robots. All we have left to do is set a mount for our brain and battery and create a structure to attach the rope to.