Wednesday, January 28, 2009

wednesday, january 28

(first part written by divya)

today in programming, we (tobi, malaika, and i) velcro-ed the electronic components onto a practice board. ok...yeeeeeeah that's kind of all we did.

toodles!
-divya


(now written by anne)

today build was uber exciting :)

the sophomores and freshmen made an amazing prototype of a "curved ledge" for the spiral corkscrew in the middle.

we also made a ghetto prototype of the brush for the corkscrew (made out of pvc and brushes epoxy-ed onto it). we powered it with a drill and tested it with our foamcore prototype of a tube with ramps and it works! yay! this could mean that we can make our own brushes instead of buying the $400 and 30-lb. cylindrical conveyor brush from mcmaster. (however, we already bought a 20" brush...)

jessa came today and we did tooooooooooons of fizzix and math... and we realized that we'll need lots of POWER for the brush in the corkscrew. we don't think the globe motor will provide enough power, and it's the strongest motor we have (other than the cim motors). which leaves us with a tough decision, because we can only use a maximum of 4 cim motors on our robot.

sooooooooo... we've decided that we will use a tank drive instead of operating the 4 wheels independently. that way, we'll only use 2 cim motors for the drive train and we can use 1 cim motor for the brush in the corkscrew.

also we got another moon ball today! which brings the grand total up to 5.

cheerio!
-anne


p.s. anna and shifrah made QUADRAPUS out of duct tape. go to picasa for pix :)

1 comment:

sherri said...

thank you annie!
i'll bake for you... sometime not robotics season.