Day 8

Today was a very productive day! Shifrah, Sarah R, and I (Anna) went to Home Depot to buy the materials needed to build the peg rack and the pole for the minibot. We were able to find everything except the pole, but when we returned back to the lab we realized that the tower structure from Breakaway is the same material and about the same thickness as the minibot pole, so we can use that to prototype.

Shifrah stayed at school to lead the construction of the rack while Annie, Divya, Tobi, Sarah R and I went to check out the Team 8's lab. We are so jealous of their lab and space! They showed us their machine shop and we got to see the great space they work in. While there we talked with them about the machine shop, this year's challenge Logomotion, and our teams in general. We decided to meet with them on Monday to possibly go over some minibot and minibot deployment designs (We can get coopertition points if we lend our minibot to another team, so this could be a win-win situation).

When we returned back to school the group working on the rack was almost done with the construction. For the remainder of the day we worked on a variety of tasks. Sarah G. and Kylie worked on reconfiguring and updating Mimi, Sarah R. and Caroline worked on minibot designs, Victoria and Nina worked on arm dimensions with our newest mentor Emma, and other people continued discussing and prototyping. One really helpful thing that we learned from Team 8 was that we could probably use one of the BaneBots motors provided in the KOP for the arm, which means that we could use all 4 CIM motors for our drivetrain. Currently we are thinking of doing a 6 or 8 wheel omni configuration which would look something like this:

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(If we do 8 wheels one more would be added to each of the long sides)

This would allow us to move quickly, but still be able to strafe sideways which will be helpful when lining up with the tubes. Shifrah and I worked on modeling the drivetrain on SolidWorks, and we are hoping to make some solid decisions about the robot design soon. Our next meeting time will be from 10-4 on Monday.

So far it looks like a great season!