Author: David Brinza

Here’s a CAD rendering of the mechanical design of FRC Team 980’s 2014 robot:

The catapult is driven by two sets of compression springs housed in the green tubes. A van door motor drives the catapult winch, which is engaged/released by an idler gear driven by a pneumatic piston. The ball pick-up roller is shown in red (design inspired by Team 16’s 2008 robot). The electronics, battery and pneumatics (not shown) are housed in a “belly pan” mounted to the chassis frame below the ball. The robot has a very low center-of-gravity and has plenty of weight margin (and provisions for mounting ballast below the chassis frame).

Team 980 is working hard to meet the 2014 Aerial Assist challenge!

We’ve made a prototype of our ball pick-up mechanism. Here’s a short video clip of it in action:

We are now meeting every weekday to get back on schedule. We had to slip our design review a few days to mature our ball shooter concept.

Here’s our updated build schedule:

We’ve got 3 weeks to get our robot ready for the “pre-bag” scrimmage – it’s “CRUNCH TIME!!”

Our lead controls student, Keiran, has deployed a private forum for team collaboration.

Team 980 members apply by clicking on the “Forums” menu tab on this website (look in the upper right) and filling out a tiny application (email address, username, password and reason for joining forum).

Our forum is built on “Vanilla” and allows categorized discussions, comments and file upload.

All team members are strongly encouraged to join!

Team 980 jumped into the 2014 FRC season at its annual Kickoff Event held Sat Jan 4 at our robot build site: 907 Flower St in Glendale.

Team members (mentors and students) introduced themselves in our meet-and-greet session. Mentors described their background, current job and why they are supporting Team 980. Students told members what school they attend and what kind of careers are interesting to them.

We then discussed our team organization structure and build season schedule. Our schedule is shown below.

 

We watched the Aerial Assist game animation, ate some pizza and assigned our first homework: Read the Game Manual!

 

Team 980 is cancelling our Tues Nov 26  PM meeting.

Tomorrow afternoon, President Obama’s is visiting DreamWorks Animation (across Flower St from our build site). Access to this area will likely be highly restricted. Team 980 made no special arrangements for access in advance of the event.

Hope everyone has a happy and safe Thanksgiving holiday!