Hi everyone, we are only 4 weeks away from hosting our first event at Mishawaka! Here are our updates and changes to our robot:

Intake & Indexing:

Promising results from this week!

We’ve seen the robot intake Fuel, and passively (and actively) index them towards the turrets. We’re yet to install the lexan ramp piece (insert pic of it being bent here), but we’re getting to a full robot test minus hang.

Some revisions we’re making to the intake are:

1: Hardstops that hit the intake’s mounting nut strips at the same time where it should be hitting bumpers, acting as a backup incase the bumpers are too low. We found that the intake could go too low, causing game pieces to hotdog roll. While this will allow for the nut strip/intake SRPP to wear down, its better than not having a proper intake for a match.

2: Gets some more kickup by increasing compression on the 2nd and 3rd rollers. Right now, our compression is about .5" in those areas, while other teams have seen much more success around ~.8-.9" between roller and bumper. For reference, our “touch it own it” roller (the VERY front roller) is running that .9" compression currently.

3: Gets a hair tighter on our various belt runs, since they’re a tiny bit loose.

As for the indexer, we have very minor changes. The balls are indexing properly, and while we’re yet to get a BPS, it preliminarily seems great.

We need to make one of our rollers aluminum, however, as there is a fail condition where the ball gets stuck against the side rollers, and causes it to bend and get stuck in the center, stalling the indexer. Minor iteration! It’s what’s going to matter this year.

Hang:

This week saw the hang CAD finalized and assembly beginning! With a “small” ratio of 250:1 and a double sprocket system to power JUST the wheels, it’s mathematically enough to roll our way up the side of the tower–stylishly–in under 5 seconds. And so, our three aluminum parts got sent for manufacturing and powder coated. And so, assembly began! Everything has been going smoothly so far with assembly, we’re just waiting for all the sprockets we need to get here and then we can actually test it!

Next steps:

1. Mounting– We need to add some sort of bracket on our main 1x2 to create additional support for the subsystem. This will more than likely be a simple part that requires a couple of holes on the front of that 1x2 that can help redistribute that force AWAY from our triple stack of 5:1 MaxPlanetaries.
2. The search for a pound– Currently, the hang sits at just over 11 lbs in CAD. In order to not exceed weight limits, the hang is going to have to lose a pound. We don’t have a set plan for what we’re going to change to get this pound back, but once we test how the whole hang actually holds up to the weight and force, we’ll assess what we can lighten.
3. Slight reconfiguration– The top 3/8" plate is going to need another thin counterpart so that the middle shaft that houses a gear that spins the two wheels in opposite directions isn’t cantilevered. This will be an easy fix, just a pretty thin plate on the same shaft. With this, though, it does push this side of the hang even closer to the other side, but luckily, the solution to that if it’s too much of a problem is that the single wheel on the support side can just switch which side of the plate it’s on. That, in addition to proper spacing, should get us back to proper dimensions pretty easily. The third change is going to add a simple pulley system to the top plate, instead of just a line of gears, to run the wheels. This will reduce our weight and reduce our points of failure–a win-win!

Overall, the lookout for the hang is optimistic! We will have to wait a bit over a week for some of our sprockets to arrive, but everything else should be put together within the week! We’re excited to update you next week on our progress with the hang. 

Wiring:

The wiring this week saw many different iterations and many ups and down so we can go through some of them

Turret wiring:

We wired the turret, well at least the top of it and made sure everything was clean for the most part. Now we’re working on routing all that wiring into a BIGUS-style mechanism that’ll keep the wires controlled and out of the way while the turret spins. The goal is to guide the wires so they wrap and unwrap smoothly instead of just hanging there waiting to get caught on something.

Big tip: zip ties are your best friend. Use them to anchor wires along a path so nothing flops around or rubs on sharp edges. Also, don’t be scared to leave a little extra wire instead of cutting everything to the exact length. That tiny bit of slack can save you big time later if something needs to move or you mess up a connection, way better than having to redo the whole wiring job because a wire ended up just a little too short.

Our wirers are proud of their hard work on the turret!!!

Bottom half:

This week on the lower part of the robot, most of what we did was routing wires through the chassis. This had to be done very carefully, since our bot is not easily repairable. I’m not going to go super in-depth here because we covered a lot of this in our last post, so I’d recommend checking that out. That said, once subassemblies are on, wiring becomes way harder to do cleanly.

Realistically, you want the robot to look as clean as possible, first impressions matter, and statistically, looking polished helps when it comes to getting picked. So here are a few things I like to do that might help some of you:

1. Use old routed marks to PDH as a baseline because it will really really help everything go smoother along with using the lines to the MPI
2. The best way to hide wires is to keep them as low as possible. Think of it like any wire that doesn’t follow a clear path shouldn’t be immediately visible. Perfection is basically impossible, though, so just aim for what looks good and don’t overthink it.
3. TRUST THE PROCESS: you have to make it look ugly to make it look nice as you’ll likely have slack that will disappear while it gets wired and it will look better so don’t think just cause it looks bad at the time it won’t turn out well
4. Wiring typically goes along with assembly so make sure you are being healthy and taking regular drinks and not starving yourself for the robot and good luck wiring to all the other teams out there
5. Don’t mount electronics with ONE point of contact….

Go Black Knights!