End of the year

      Today is an unusual meeting. We are meeting on Friday to make major changes to the bot. We are makng towers tothe bot to catch the new arms to pick up crates. The bot can now pick up crates at new angles. "Jiggles" no has a platform on the scissor lift to stablize the crates on the back of the bot. The New parts should help the bot do better in the next competition.

         We are excited for the San diego competition and using the new devises

Our bot had a major surgery

Add caption

Today we are reparing the the bot and adding new parts and autonomies. currently has no front, and no conveyor belt. We now will add a second arm to the bot and are making new programs for them. The bot needs a working arm to pick up crates. Also the conveyor belt is narrower and the bot will look different at the San Diego compitition.

MERRY CHRISTMAS

Today we are prototyping new designs for picking up crates. We are starting to make a capacity for our bot to score magnet balls. We are prototyping new ways to move magnet balls to the goal. Phi Omega has made a new idea to move the bowling ball too.

More prototyping

Last week, during our post-competition discussion, we made a list of problems we'd encountered during competition so that we could work on solving them.  During the competition, our left front motor had failed, and something was also wrong with the servo on the crate-grabbing mechanism.  Also, sometimes balls from the conveyor didn't make it into the crates on the scissor lift.
We wanted to fix the left front motor and servo on the crate grabber, make the ball chute less steep (so balls from the conveyor actually make it into the crates), and make a new or modified crate-grabbing mechanism.  We easily fixed the left front motor by adding some spacers, and today we fixed the servo as well.

Since we have a few weeks until the next competition, we're concentrating on prototyping the new mechanisms for grabbing crates.  We have several designs, including a slight modification of our current "tomahawk," two different types of mechanisms for squeezing crates, and a little pincher that goes on the back of the scissor lift to get crates that way.

We hope to finish our major modifications to the robot in the next few weeks, so that we can concentrate on driver practice.  We'll also need to work on some more autonomies before San Diego.

Dec. 15

Dec. 15

Last saturday we had our first competition of the year. We were able to get into the finals with team 5011, or Botsquad from SOAR High School. In the semi finals our alliance placed fourth. We lost because of the failure to tighten our axel locks and we lost the ability to use our left motors. Phi-Omega's robot "Jiggles"? has had problems with encoder motors burning out. Our lesson from the competition are that we need to bring more assembled encoder motors, tighten gears after Every match, and get more driver training. The team is working on new autonomies and new ways to pick up crates.

Scissor Lift