4 Uninterrupted days of Botics!

With semester break now, we have four straight days of free time to build robots! And we plan on putting it to good use. On mechanical, we have made a lot of progress. We now have our new wheel-mounts on the robot frame, placing the robot about 1/8 of an inch off the ground. For the minibot delivery system, we plan on using a pneumatically powered slider to shoot the minibot onto the ten foot pole.

Sadly, the minibot itself has proven very difficult. We have been tinkering with the built-in transmissions on the motors, trying to eliminate some of the down gearing to get them faster, but the loss in torque currently makes it so that the minibot can't climb the pole anymore. We hope to fix that by reducing weight (maybe using magnets?) but we my just have to return to the original gear ratios.

We are also experimenting with eliminating the transmission in its entirety on the minibots, and reducing torque by not using wheels, but instead axles wrapped in surgical tubing. If this works, it could produce a very quick climb.

Other than building our robots, we've also been spending a lot of time lately at Stewart Middle School either helping to build the field or helping other teams with coding. More on that later from Tosh.