Week 1

Authored by Ishan Deshpande

Summary: Basic brainstorming and prototyping of several different ideas for climbing and shooting mechanisms.

Description: Monday and Tuesday were days off for our school district (Round Rock ISD), so we arrived at school at 9:00 AM and left around 7:00 – 7:30 PM. Many different ideas were proposed for our climbing and shooting mechanism, but here are the ideas that seemed most feasible and seemed to gain the greatest advantage for our team.

Buddy Climb

A Buddy Climb is a very ambitious, but possibly executable idea. This includes strapping an alliance partner’s robot to ours and climbing using a combination of an elevator (to deploy two hooks onto the GENERATOR SWITCH), and winch to pull our robot up onto the switch. Successfully completing a buddy climb would allow our team to essentially guarantee the alliance a Ranking Point, making us a very valuable alliance partner. Prototyping has yet to be completed, but the basic design is shown below:

Shooting Mechanism

The shooting mechanism was proposed to have one flywheel as well as an adjustable hood to shoot the ball out. Prototype shown below:

Collection Mechanism

The collection mechanism has mecanum wheels on either side to center the POWER CELLS, and allows the POWER CELLS to be fed into a magazine (prototype not built yet) that will hold, hypothetically, up to 5 POWER CELLS.

Prototype shown below:

In addition to these three prototypes and ideas, we wired up a demo bot and imaged/configured both the radio and the RoboRIO to be ready for testing purposes. Mr. Wilmot and a few other students started to gather all the parts for the GENERATOR SWITCH and corresponding structure, which they will start building the next day.

New members are continuously being introduced to new tools, components, and electronics, and this season is shaping up to be a great one.