Meeting Tuesday 10-28-08

Attendance: Ian, Penelope, Tucker, Jared, Nick, Kevin, Ethan

Agenda:

• Haul stuff in
• Talk about electronics
• Talk about blogging
• Talk about safety
• Work on robot
• Test shaft encoders
• Think about sensors

What actually happened:

We all met together to talk about safety for both hardware and electronics.

We added the white tape lines to the floor of our partial arena.

We decided to change how the motor and servo controllers are mounted on our robot to give us more space on the top to design manipulators with.

We wrote some RobotC code to move forward N clicks and stop to learn how to use the shaft encoders.




Coach John's shirt pretty much sums it up for us...

What happened on Saturday:

On Saturday Ian, Kevin, Penelope, Ethan, Tucker, Chris, Ben, and Travis went with John and Jeff to OMSI, to demonstrate and work on our robots. One of the VEX robots from last year was there to be driven around.

Ian and Kevin did
a little testing on
the Prototype
sensor board.

Then Ian taught Chris and Penelope a little about robotC.

Ben and Travis worked on team 267’s robot.

Ethan and Tucker supervised the VEX bots.

Hello everyone it's me Jared i guess I'm only bloging because i have to so here it goes as a first timer. today i learned a little about the RobotC and got set up on this bloging with Ian. thats about all i did today. By the way how often do we have to blog here? once a week?

Meeting Tuesday 10/21/08

Attendance: Ian, Kevin, Penelope, Ethan, Chris, Tucker, Nick, Jared

The agenda for today's meeting:

• Get everyone using the blog
  
• Fix practice feild
  
• Set up RobotC for Vex
  
• Test the robot
  
• Come up with manipulator designs
  
  

Last week during team 267's meeting, the partial circle goal got broken.

Here is Kevin creating metal brackets to repair it.

And here is one of the new brackets installed on the field.

We started to get RobotC for VEX set up so that we can use the Vex bots from last year. We will be participating in a robot demonstration at OMSI this Saturday and plan to bring our Vex bots from last year as well as our new Tetrix bots.

Blackboard brainstorming...

Trying out the dump bed mockup that Ian made at home last night.

We have been having problems with the DC drive motors on our robot. We havent had fine motor control, which we really want. Coach Jeff reverted to an older version of RobotC and the problem went away, but that also removed the updates that came in the current one. When we shifted back to the current build, we again lost fine motor control.

Attitude is everything.

Biographies

Ok team, here we should add bios for ourselves as comments. We need to have one for each of us.

IM brainstorming

Tonight Tucker and I talked about some ideas over google talk, here they are:

Tucker: i mean i had a few ideas, but not during the meeting

should i go ahead and post them anyway?

Ian: go ahead and put them up if you want

it is our team's notebook

it should include ideas

Tucker: what about for a scoring mechanism kind of like a cross between a combine harvester and a garbage or a dump truck?

Ian: i had tought of a dumptruck type thing

Tucker: ok

Ian: dont see anyway we could implement a combineharvester thing though

Tucker: we could work together on it this weekend or next week

Ian: of course any ideas of how to get pucks from the floor into the bin would be much apprecieated

assume you have a max of 2 motors and 2 servos

Tucker: yeah, we won't need much power to lift the pucks, just enough to get them into the hopper-thing.

Tucker: but i want to work on this hopper thing at some point

Ian: awesome, the idea i had has it cantalever out about a foot

and up a bit

Tucker: that could work

Ian: think similar to a paralellagram

Tucker: it would be simpler just to hinge it though

Ian: we could shape the bucket like a paint roller thing

we couldnt get it into the triangle

Tucker: well yeah

Ian: this would also tip it in the process, (hopefully)

Tucker: i dunno

Ian: the goal is a full hopper in the triangle

Tucker: we could try both

Ian: yes, we could have a servo on the end that tips it

if necessary

Tucker: are you sure a servo could support that much weight?

Ian: it wouldnt have to

you have 4 that move a frame the hopper is in

Tucker: when it tips it

Ian: and one to lift the back end

Tucker: that one is going to be under a lot of stress

Ian: its only lifting 1/16" alluminum or polycarbinate + some 2oz pucks

Tucker: well yeah but taken into account the size of the tray

Ian: think of it like a lever

the further from the hinge point you are the easier it is to move

Tucker: if we do that it'd be a 3rd class lever

we may not have enough effort from 1 servo to move that much of a load

Ian: we do have 2 motors left if necesarry

Tucker: yeah

well we'll see when we work on it

Ian: yeah we will have some foam board or cardboard or something to use when working on ideas for the manipulator

Tucker: yeah

Ian: regardless we will add a plow to the back incase

Tucker: yeah

Meeting Tuesday 10/14/08

Attendance: Ian, Penelope, Kevin, Tucker, Ethan, 

This was the first official meeting of the tuesday team. We split into groups to cover a number of different tasks:

• Programing and testing the first design of our robot's base
• Make the Triangular goal for the club's partial arena
• Make a sign to put on the door so students know where we meet
• Start a blog to be our notebook
• Set up the partial arena in the club room:

We test-fit our robot chasis against the round goal to see if the touch sensors are in the right place and if we high-center on the drive gears.

Then we sketched ideas for a puck delivery mechanism:

Welcome!

Welcome to the blog that is the engineering notebook for The Benson Robotics Club's team # 187.  Here we discuss what happens at our team meetings, and any ideas or progress we make.

It looks like the way we are going to be doing this is by creating posts for each relevent day/meeting and then people add comments saying what they did/discovered etc.