FTC 7314 Engineering Notebook 2014-10-11

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Competition Season Meeting

Meeting Date Meeting Time Location Attendees
Saturday, October 11 2pm-5pm TCHS Brandywine Laura, Braden, Trevor, CJ, Amal, Morgan, Josh, Justin, Nick, Akhila


Tasks Reflections
Setting Deadlines
  • Today, we all discussed the timeline of the near future. The qualifying tournament is coming up fast, so made a schedule.
  • We listed all the upcoming meetings, some of which will be taken up by scrimmages, or volunteering for FLL.
  • We also listed all the tasks we will need to be accomplished by the tournament.
  • Then we discussed when each task could realistically be accomplished by, and set some tentative deadlines. We might have to schedule a few extra practices for driver practice.
  • We do not have as much time as we thought. We need to wrap up prototyping soon, and start building our official robot!
Working on Intake
  • Braden, Trevor, and Amal were able to finish the intake and get most of the wires higher so they could implement the design to get the balls in the moving goals.
Chassis Design Layout
  • CJ, Amal, and Morgan started to design a chassis that would fit all the components the protoype chassis could not. They had to include space for the shooter that would take up a large amount of space as well as the intake. They had to make a chassis design that was as efficient as possible with the space given( 18" by 18" by 18"). Additionally the NXT, Tetrix controllers, and motor controllers had to be squeezed in as well.
80-20 Finish
  • 8 80-20 pieces were completed
  • 2 sliders were completed.
  • A dead line was set for 10/20/14.
  • Mentor Andrew helped Josh and Justin complete the 2 remaining 80-20 pieces to make a total of 8 which will be used as the linear slide as there is going to be 4 80-20 on each side to add stability and speed. We also started work on the slider pieces for the linear slide.
Continuing Prototyping the Drum Shooter
  • Laura, Nick, and Akhila worked on implementing the drum shooter they had made last meeting.
  • They built the frame to hold the drum wheel. To prevent the surgical tubing from getting wrapped around the shaft, they could only connect to the wheel on one side.
  • They also added the surgical tubing. They added a bolt to the wheel, which had nuts and a spacer on the other end. The surgical tubing zip tied to the spacer.
  • Then, it was tested. They pulled the wheel so the tubing had tension, and put the ball in the slot. But when the ball was shot, it did not have enough acceleration to reach 4 ft.
  • They tried to move the mounting point of the surgical tubing on the wheel, but it did not help much. They also tried to change the mounting point of the surgical tubing at the other end, but that didn't help either.
  • They will hopefully find a way to improve this solution, but if not, we may have to revert to the whacker for the fast approaching tournaments.


Recorded by: Date: Journal Editor: Akhila Date: