Week 7 Day 14, October 5, 2018

     We took off the arm completely to be able to reinforce it and so that it does not go in a full circle and smash the cortex. Because of that, we decided to move the cortex to a different location on the robot so that it does not interfere with the motion of the arm. We will be making any necessary adjustments in order for our robot to function properly and not damage itself when we test it out. If everything goes according to plan, our robot should be able to move around and have a functional arm moving up and down by the end of next week.

Week 7 Day 13, October 1, 2018

     We realized that the arm we have now needs more power and support. The base of it can barely keep it up at rest much less when the arm was being lifted which it can't do on it's own. The motors are not strong enough on their own. We have decided to add support and use gears and make more torque.

Week 6 Day 12, September 27, 2018

     Today we fixed the previous problem with the motors and started deciding on how we should build the rest of our bot (ie. claw/shooter). After a while we decided to make it a claw/tower based design and started working on a basic claw for the end of it and began building an arm for the bot.

Week 6 Day 11, September 25, 2018

     We finally finished the attaching the next 3 wheels on the opposite side of the robot, including the motors. After we finished, we wanted to test drive it, and ran into a a minor problem and a major problem. The minor problem was the top left motor needed to be reversed, but the more serious issue was the fact that only the left wheels were moving, not the right. So tomorrow and next class we will hopefully have that resolved.

Week 5 Day 10, September 21, 2018

     Today we attached half of our wheels. Before doing it we also decided how to actually put them on, because we were stuck between if we would use two motors connected to all three wheels or if we would have one wheel with only one motor than the other two wheels connected to one to get more torque. Next class we will continue to attach the last 3 wheels no the other side.

Week 5 Day 9, September 18, 2018

     This week, we are still rebuilding our robot into a new design since we've decided to copy the design of a robot that a former student built last year. We finished building our chassis and we're ready to begin taking the measurements of the locations of where the axles for the gears and for the motors will be placed. By the end of the week, we should have at least one side of the robot fitted with gears and motors and the other side will be completed next week.

Week 4 Day 8, September 14, 2018

     As a team we were putting our heads around the new bot design. We are copying a bot from last year but with important modifications to make it work for this challenge. We didn't do much with the new bot it self but we got our ideas in order.

Week 4 Day 7, September 12, 2018

     We decided to start from scratch after realizing that to do what we wanted to do would end up making our robot too big. We have completely dismantled our previous robot. Our new design will be a modified version of a previous students robot.

Week 3 Day 6 September 7, 2018

We came up with the idea of a "Clauncher", where we will create our own type of claw/grabber to be able to grab the caps, turn it over, grab the balls, and use pneumatics to launch it at the flags. Right now we are working on making a SolidWorks model of the Clauncher, and as for the current physical build we are building towers to hold the Clauncher. Although  the idea seems great in theory, we need to try our best to make sure everything work out.

Week 3 Day 5, September 5, 2018

Today we decided to redo our original design and switch to a six wheel drive so we had to redo our wheel system, which included taking it apart and rebuilding it to include a motor for each wheel. We did this to add more torque to all the wheels to allow us to climb the platforms and complete the first challenge. The final thing we did was start deciding how we are gonna work on the claw, so far we have an idea but nothing is set in stone.

Ben writing Blogs

Week 2 Day 4, August 29, 2018

Today, we were working on moving the motors for our robot so that each wheel can be moving smoothly. We decided to move two motors from their original spot to the two back wheels. Now, the two big back wheels will be powered directly from the motors. The other two motors will be attached to gears powering two wheels each. We're hoping to have the robot moving around by the end of the week.

Week 2 Day 3, August 27, 2018

Half our team put on most of the wheels and motors to the chassis of the bot on Friday and we finished today. The plan we had was to create the code and see if the design of the bot's chassis could go over the pipes and adjust both the bot and code as needed.  However we didn't charge the batteries so we could do what we wanted but by next time the batteries should be ready and we can test our ideas

Week 1 Day 2, August 23, 2018

     We have started to place our wheels onto the robot. We have settled upon six wheel drive and 4 motors. The back most wheels will have more torque to push itself forward onto the platforms.

Week 1 Day 1, August 21, 2018

     My team and I came up with the team name Budget Justice League. We started building a chassis for the robot. One of the ideas we had were having both a "forklift" kind of design for the claw that can lift the caps as well as flip them, and also having a "flywheel" mechanism to launch the balls into the flags. For now though those are only ideas, since we haven't finished with the chassis. My team and I will continue researching different potential designs as well as dwell deeper into the rules of the game.

Forklift Design

Flywheel Design