Hello team!

James and I had a good day yesterday finishing up the elevator and trying to shoot orbit balls through the ceiling. (Yes Sherbot, we were clear of the sailplane! ) Bottom line is that the elevator works pretty well, and we were only running one motor!

Tonight we need to finish more on the turret. I found a cold solder joint on the encoder board I had, and we will swap it into the turret tonight. Also need to get an encoder board mounted to read the turret position. Maybe we'll even have the rest of our ring gears?!

Lots of work shaping up for the electrical team. We'll take a look at our list of challenges tonight. One thing we need to get prioritized is getting encoders on the KOP and competition chassis. Do we have 4+ encoders???

Yes, I know this is all taxing our time and abilities. Time to stretch and get through the season!

Dean

Good morning team! Big day today. All teams have been working hard this week and this is the day for integration. As a mentor, I've found it very rewarding to see everyone getting engaged in the tasks, mastering new skills, pulling hard towards the same goals and creatively solving the problems we've encountered. I'm sure today will be no different!

Last night I threw together some MDF into pulleys to have as backups for today. They are just roughed to shape, so we can finish them on the metal lathe to get the precision we want.

I also picked up the turret limit switches at Radio Shack and some connectors for the F-P motors.

We still need the white Fischer-Price gear. If anyone knows where it is, please get it to Cody or Ian.

See you in 26 minutes!
Dean

Tonight we mounted the elevator and the ground hog faceplate onto the chassis. Score... It seemed to go together smoothly. Dean, Jose, and John started to make the shafts for the belts. Saturday should get us far. Oh, and the grease in the gear boxes stinks amazingly bad. Unbelievable

made a sub vi named camera stalking.
This routine sets a value to the motors based on the position of the camera to turn towards a target. It then goes towards the target until it is a certain distance away. (as of the moment too close to be read by the camera).

problems we had
connecting to the autonomous.vi terminals
executing our own sub program camera stalking. It was labled as non-executable.

Today we almost finished the assembly of the elevator. It took longer than I expected. Don't judge. We also had to change up the design a bit to accomadate for the ball to enter, not a big deal. Next session we should have it done. The assembly seems to becoming along well though.

Thanks to team 2122 for pointing out that the gear box on the globe motor is easily modified. The output shaft of the globe motor assembly turns at approximately 81 RPM. By taking the gear box apart and removing the second stage of planetary gears we will get approximately 310 RPM. Need to count teeth on the gears to get a real number.
Removing the second stage is the easy part. Now we need to shorten the housing by .25 inches. New roll pin holes were drilled last night .25 inches up from the old ones and today one of the students will use the lathe to cut .25 inches off the bottom of the housing. Then we should be ready to go. Hopefully this will be the speed we need to turn the turret.

Text from a Chief Delphi post in case you want to understand how to calculate the RPM:
Using the planetary stage reduction formula (R/S) + 1 for each stage, where R is the number of teeth in the ring gear and S in the number of teeth on the sun gear, and counting the teeth as follows:

First stage S = 21, R = 59, second stage S = 13, R = 59, output stage S = 13, R =59,

I get motor stage reduction = 3.8095:1, second stage reduction = 5.5385:1, output stage reduction = 5.5385:1, so the overall reduction is the product of these, or 116.855:1, which agrees closely with the published figure 117:1. The published free speed is 81 +/- 7 RPM

Cody and I worked on modeling the lift drive system. Looks like we have a solution. We will need to make some simple brackets tonight and hopefully machine the drive shaft. Putting a hex end on the drive shaft may require the use of the right angle rotary table on the mill. Oh goodie!

Pulley design was also worked on and hopefully we'll turn some samples to try that out tonight.

today we went over chasis and camera mounting options .... we researched on the teams and color cordnation. we set up plans to test distance formulas for the camera. James worded on the gyro chips and acceleramitor.

The elevator was decided to be made out of mainly lexan with a bit of aluminum at the bottom for support. It took a while to get all the dimensions right, but we finally got it. We cut and assembled most of the elevator and it looks promising. The entry way for the ball to enter the hopper has also been made.It gives a 25" opening for the feeder wheel to go across. The encoder mounts have been made on the rapid prototyper.

http://www.ni.com/pdf/manuals/372192b.pdf

Take a look and let's determine if we can use it.

Found it on Chief Delphi tonight.