Robotics - Material of Champions

The robot was being tinkered with the entire three hours of this meeting, so I didn't get a chance to improve the autonomous program. Most of my time this meeting was spent watching the tinkering (trying to understand what was going on) and watching/tinkering with the 3D printer in the other room. A team member with experience operating 3D printers did some good work repairing the printer. After removing the extrusion head from the acetone bath, it was much cleaner and could actually extrude.

We then entered a period of trial-and-error with the printer bed height that took at least an hour. We had to tighten and loosen some hex screws at the corners of the glass bed to tune the height and angle, then wait for the bed and extruder to heat up again. Along the way, we also discovered a kink in the filament routing area that was stopping much of the plastic from entering the extrusion head. After all the adjustments, the printer can print our sheet of linear bearings, which should be finished in the morning. (It takes a while.)

The major feature that our robot needs before it can be useful is a lift to elevate the balls we take to the tubes. We also need a place to store the balls, so we had to put into production the cardboard box of prototypeness. It works, but looked really out of place in all the metal machinery. The aesthetics were soon repaired: a ramp from the ball intake belt to the storage box was built out of cardboard and attached with zip ties. That's some quality engineering right there.

To control the outflow of balls, we added a servo flap to that box. This is our first servo, so we had to find and mount a servo controller. The mounting was easy enough, but powering it was a challenge; the only viable mounting place was far away from the battery and on the opposite side of the robot as the Samantha module (which has to be the last device in the power chain). Since we didn't want to send cables all around and redo our existing ball of wires, we ended up jamming two wires into one socket to create parallel circuits.

There is a meet tomorrow! We'll test the servo flap controls and do some general polishing then.