Week 3 Update

Hey everyone! We’re Visakan and Jules, the electrical lead and safety director of the team. Week 3 has been very productive, and we’re excited to tell you all about it! 

Design

This week, our team has been working very hard to finish the full robot CAD.

The newest addition to our robot has been the climber. With the PDRs, CDRs, and additional prototype testing, we’ve been able to tweak the designs and make them even better! We also completed the CDR with the elevator successfully.

Mechanical

We finished the production and assembly of our first subsystem, the Coral Corral. After overcoming many technical issues with the router, our mechanical team was able to finish routing the parts for the drivetrain. We also started the manufacturing of the elevator; there are many parts to machine for this component, but our team’s got this! 

We also taught a few of our new mechanical members how to operate machines in the shop, such as the mill, lathe, and CNC router. They now know how to machine the tubes, shafts, and standoffs for our robot.

Electrical

With the drivetrain assembled, we were able to start wiring it. Although we ran into some difficulties with the mechanical components on the drivetrain, we successfully finished it. The wiring we did is temporary, as this drivetrain serves as a testing device for the programmers. In the future, once all the robot subsystems are on we can fully wire up the drivetrain. 

Safety

As we finished constructing the barge, we spotted a potential safety hazard, which was the low head clearance under the barge. This could have caused accidents when our members worked on field elements, tested subsystems, or simply walked under the barge. 

Our solution was to install pool noodles on the edges, which will act as cushions to prevent injuries.

Programming

This week has been tough on our programmers as most of it was spent troubleshooting the motor controllers because the clients for those were not working properly.  We did however make a skeleton code for the elevator, although untested, it serves as a great starting point.

That’s all we have for week 3, we’re proud of our progress so far and can’t wait to see the robot finally assembled. Stay tuned for more updates on week 4!