Tuesday, November 25, 2014

End of the week (Accomplishments)

Short week

This week we only have had 2 days too make improvements so we haven't accomplished as much as we would have hoped too and will continue to work on our goals next week. We have established are plan on switching brains but have not made any action towards it yet. We also have not been able too make many improvements too our shooting mechanism as well but we have some ideas in mind.

Old brain too be replaced
New brain to be put installed

Monday, November 24, 2014

Beginning of the week (Goals)

Trajectory and Stability 

This week we plan to adjust the Trajectory of the shooter to have a more desirable arch. We have to improve the stability of the it as well. Our other goal is to add some flat metal to in the middle of the bot in an attempt to organize our wires. Also we have a rough idea to improve the shooter by adding a cylindrical tube made of flat metal for storing more ping-pong balls at once. This is so we can shoot more than one in rapid succession.

Messing around with the tradjectory 
Wire mess

Friday, November 21, 2014

End of the week (Accomplishments)

Updated Claw and Tightening 

New motor
New Claw
This week we replaced a faulty motor in the claw mechanism. We also adjusted to the claw itself  to better pick up the ping-pong balls. The shooter mechanism was tightened this week as well, however there is still some issues with the shooter's stability, as it loosen every time it is used.



Monday, November 17, 2014

Beginning of the week (Goals)

Claws & Motors

Defective motor 
New and improved robot
This week we have to replace a faulty motor in our claw mechanism. This will probably be finished today. We also have to adjust the metal pieces that make up our claw. At the moment they are flat and straight. We need to curve them and add anti-friction padding. Since our robot is generally new we will be perfecting the new design and making sure that everything is working up to our expectations. The overall plan for thins week will be testing and tightening  

Starting to fix the claw

Friday, November 14, 2014

End of the week (Accomplishments)

Gadgets and Changes

This week everything on our robot has changed with the exception of our chassis. Our original game design that we had, which shared similarities to basketball, has changed. Our new game consists of picking up ping-pong balls without using the pre-made VEX claw and then shooting them at red solo cups; hitting stacked ones yields more points. The arm and End of Factor design we had at the beginning of the week has been scraped. We now have a two piece mechanism in the center of our chassis. One piece is designed to pick up ping-pong balls an then place them in our "shooter" (the second piece). The first piece is a simple claw design that consist of two medium sized gears that are connected to 2 skinny metal pieces. They're curved and covered in friction resistant cloth. This will act like a Standard VEX claw. The second piece is like a scaled down tennis ball launcher made for ping pong balls. It has a very high speed compound gear ratio with 2 separate motors, each with their own large VEX wheels.

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Shooting Mechanism:
High Speed Compound gear-rario
Ping-Pong ready for Launch                  Launched                       


















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Claw:
Custom Claw 
Arm that Claw will be attached to soon

Monday, November 10, 2014

Beginning of the week (Goals)

End of Factor & Replacing 

This week we have to replace our end of factor as it a duplicate of our previous robots. We plan on replacing our current claw with a more official claw that will be used to pick up the balls that will be used in game. On top of this we have begun brainstorming ideas for a new game and hope to have a new idea in place by the end of today so we can start making adjustments for it on our robot as soon as possible.

Coded Brain

R.I.P
2014-2014


Friday, November 7, 2014

End of the week (Accomplishments)

Finished Bot, Final Adjustments

As it stand we have finished the entirety of the robot and are only currently making small adapatations to the robot to make sure it runs as well as possible. We have also finished programming the bot and arm to a level that will suffice for our game. At this point the only major thing that we were not able to complete this week is construct the game itself and put together the field for it to be played on.


Gear ratios used on our robot.

Gear Ratio (Chassis)

Gear Ratio (Arm)




Monday, November 3, 2014

Beginning of the week (Goals)

Wires & End of factor 

This week we plan to organize the wires for the robot. At the moment they have no set place to be or  are not plugged in so we might work on a small area to contain them. We also are going to be testing the end of factor and making adjustments if necessary as it is the newest piece of our robot and has yet to see any practical use.

End of factor 
unorganized wires