FTC 7314 Engineering Notebook 2015-09-19

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Competition Season Meeting

Meeting Date Meeting Time Location Attendees
Saturday, 19-September-2015 2:00-4:00pm TCHS Brandywine Josh, Justin, Braden, Amal, Bennett, Wade, Daniel, Trent, Jacob, Myles


Objectives / Systems Hypotheses, tests, observations, conclusions, plans
Climb the Mountain
  • Tops of the 1/2" Hex horizontal bars are 1.25" above the red or blue ramp (measured normal to the ramp surface).
  • The ramp (low & mid regions) incline is 30 deg.
  • The high region incline angle is 50 deg.
Debris Intake * trent came up with a design for an intake that involved a box that lifts 1 piece of derbris at at time on a vertical conveyer belt.
  • Myles worked on the idea he had for the intake which scooped balls into a container.
  • Braden worked on building a chassie for the intake desighns and other desighns for getting debrie.
  • Braden, Amal, Myles, and Trent were part of the intake section.
  • Amal's idea was like a circular intake like a loop going into a pole. As well as collecting it into the tube.
Debris Storage
  • Josh, Wade and Snarr were part of the storage section.
  • The three pondered storage ideas thoughout most of the meeting but could not agree on a storage solution.
  • the team worked on ideas for the debris. scoring collecting and storeing we split up into groups and worked on 1 of the three tasks the team that was working on scoring and storing teamed up later had shared ideas.
  • Bennet helped Wade refine his design for the robot.
  • Team scoring worked on a way to take that ideas from team storage came up with and an idea to get the debris into the holder.
  • Daniel, Bennett, and Justin worked on scoring and decided that, depending on the drive train, they are doing a shooter or a slider.


Tasks Reflections
Center of Mass
  • We reviewed the concept of center of mass (using the team's drive-train presentation as an introduction).
  • Center of mass is critical to this year's game owing to the climb. With mountain angles of 30 and 50 deg, preventing tip-over and a painful roll down the mountain will be a challenge.
  • Center of mass needs to be front and center; or
  • the robot will need to securely grapple onto the mountain to avoid tipping.
Climbing Test
  • Using this summer's test chassis, we ran some climbing tests. No trouble with the low section and climbing the 30 deg ramp. The robot's 4" front wheels were able to get over the lowest two 1/2" hex horizontal bars, but after this the bottom of the chassis frame's contact with the lowest horizontal bar prevented the rear wheel from achieving contact with the ramp. Conclusion is that more ground clearance is needed to climb the mid portion of the mountain using wheels.

Action and idea Journal



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