Welcome back to the Team 980 blog and thank you for choosing us for all your robotics bloggy needs! We are a little late on getting this one out and that is my fault, grades were due… Since we had a lot of updates from the different subteams and we are already late, we will post them all together in this post. In the future when grades are not due, each big update will get its own day and only small updates would be posted together like this. So buckle up, pull on the yellow strap (Disneyland reference), and hold on while we go around the buildspace and see what everyone was doing this last week.
– Alex Davis, Chronically late blog and controls mentor
Fabrication
As Week One of build season comes to a close, the Fabrication area of Team 980 ThunderBots is excited to report our accomplishments. We have completed three of our five desired field elements, the Hatch Loading Station and Hab Levels 2 & 3, to assist in prototyping and in creating autonomous code. Fabrication also prepared the mechanical elements of our practice robot by scrapping the driving base of an older robot, and handed it over to Controls to wire up.
The team has also semi-decided on a articulating arm to pick up and deliver both game pieces so a couple of us were tasked with finding the gear reductions we would need for our arm’s joints. We settled on ratios that would give us high torque but still let us move fast, so changing loads will not affect our cycles. Here’s to another good week!
– Mateo, Head of Fabrication
Business and Outreach
This week the Business and Outreach team created a timeline for when the various award materials must be completed such as the chairman’s essay, the executive summary, judge presentation booklets, and pit decor. We also discussed acquiring new members for the sub-team to ensure we have enough people to give an exemplary chairman’s presentation. For week two we plan to begin brainstorming ideas for the theme of our chairman’s essay as well as outline what information we want to include. Additionally, we will begin brainstorming themes for the chairman’s video.
– Ethan, Head of Business and Outreach
Design
After kickoff and the game reveal our design team immediately jumped into action. We began developing various concepts for this year’s robot and looking at very basic prototypes. At the start of the week, all four Team 980 subteams came together to work on basic designs, each focusing on a certain aspect of the new game. By deliberating between all of our members, we were able to develop objectives for our robot and a game strategy. As we progressed throughout the week, the design team individually developed more advanced concepts as well as started the 3D assembly of this year’s drivetrain.
On Saturday we once again convened with the team and continued work on the concepts that the design team were able to expand upon. The entire team continued to focus on refining some of the early concepts of game piece pick-up and articulation. Longtime design team member Sea developed a small scale prototype of an articulating arm, while another group led by Robert worked with our fabrication team to make a full-size prototype of a cargo pickup mechanism. Dhruv, Robert and I continued to work in CAD on the frame and drivetrain assemblies. As we go onto week 2 of the build season we are going to start preliminary designs of the arm and game piece manipulators, as well as develop more concepts for a method of mounting the habitat platforms.
– Sean, Head of Design
Controls
After investigating the changes to the 2019 Control System, the Controls team has been wiring and configuring a practice drive base “borrowed” from the 2017 robot. As a training exercise, we had all the new controls team members lead robot system board rebuild including both electronics and pneumatics. On Saturday, we successfully got it driving!
– Luke, Head of Controls
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