Breakaway!

HOLA! The build season has FINALLY begun. Sorry about the lack of posts. We have been busy at work prototyping and working hard this first week of the build season! Today it has been gloomy outside but inside we have been hard at work. We have started building the field and have been making great progress. We have completed some of the bumps for the field.

The biggest problem we seem to be having is how would we get the robot over the bump without flipping over. Lots of ideas were passed around including having a robot that was gender neutral. This way the robot will be the same on top as it is on bottom, so if it flipped over, it could continue as if it never even flipped in the first place! Which is TOTALLY AWESOME! Unfortunately, it was subtly placed to the side and was abolished as an idea. We decided that it would be easier to have a mechanism to flip us just in case than to have double the mechanisms.

We began testing ideas right away. We designed and prototyped everything from flippers... to a kicker... to a plunger... to a test chassis. We discussed using the kit chassis as the base of the robot, but the big worry was it may not be strong enough to hold everything and handle the bumps and bruises that come in competition. We are using it as our test bot so that when we get the actual chassis together, we will have the final design of the robot in mind making building take a lot less time to build. We started designing and building a kicker just to find out that it didn't have much of a kick. After rebuilding the kicker using a few different designs, we still realized that it still didn't have much power. We found success in a plunger mechanism which contained a lot of power and could easily be built.

So now that I have finally caught up to today.... We are fixing up the kit chassis to decide the style of the wheels and how many will be put on the robot. We even hooked up the electronics to attempt to run the robot over the bump. The robot successfully went over the bump, but the chain popped off in the process. One of the chains were too long and a link was removed giving the chain more tension. The field is almost complete!!!!! We even got a target made and hope to use it with the camera. We have done so much in a week. Can't wait to see what all we can accomplish in the weeks to come!

~ Liz and Andrea