Difference between revisions of "FTC 7314 Engineering Notebook 2014-09-15"

• Akhila, Laura, CJ, Nick, and Amal tried to prototype and test out a single wheel shooter mechanism.
• This shooter would shoot a ball up a tube into a rolling goal. We originally wanted to stay away from shooting, due to reliability concerns, but the tube will give us the reliability we need.
• Laura was originally worried that the motor would not have enough power to shoot the wheel. But after testing a tetrix motor without a gearbox, it shot the ball really far, and really hard.
• There were a variety of wheels tested this includes the standard Textrix wheel, Omni wheel, as well the orange grippy wheel.
• The first wheel that was tested was the regular textrix wheel. The outside rubber covering acted like rubber band and would actually separate itself from the plastic center when spun at full speed. This design was rejected due to this flaw.
• The next test consisted of an Omni wheel being spun using the textrix motor without a gearbox. The sides of the Omni wheel would separate when it spun too fast. As a result of this the smaller side wheels on the Omni would fly off. This caused them to ricochet around the room and injure Nick's finger. One screw was lost and was never found! This flaw also prevented this design from moving any further.
• We thought with a better quality wheel, and/or a slower motor, we might be able to shoot the ball, so we searched for a better wheel, and found an orange wheel.
• Lastly a orange wheel was going to be tested. Considering the inside of the orange wheel did not fit with the axle of the tetrix motor, a change needed to be made to the design of it's attachment. This process was worked on until the end of the meeting and will continue the next meeting.
• We got to use a lathe, and a drill press so we could test the orange wheel. It was really fun, but also kind of scary!
• CJ burned a screw to make it come out of an object! (AKA he used the soldering iron on the motor)

• Brad, Morgan, and Braden worked on designing the 8-bar on Solidworks, and learned how to mate parts on the program. Sadly, the data was lost, but they now have the knowledge to recreate the design.
• At least we learned our lesson early--ALWAYS SAVE YOUR WORK!!

• Josh has a headache life after finishing all his solidworks designing the linear slide prototype, sliders, and sliders on the linear slide prototype.

• CJ, Amal and Akhila also briefly looked at other back up ideas for the robot. Mentor Clem gave the idea of a pulley device that served as a scoring mechanism that, instead of shooting the balls which was our initial idea, we would drop the balls into the tubes for scoring.

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