Whoooops! It’s been a while since an update, but our excuse is, we’ve been busy!
In years past, we would already have a drivetrain and mechanism prototypes built on the actual robot chassis, and would be doing all of the design on-the-fly, and on the actual robot. Kinda tells you how accurate our "“manufacturing” process was sometimes, eh"? :D
This season, we’ve been dedicating a lot more time to prototyping and CAD-ing different mechanisms, and making said prototypes out of wood/PVC pipe. This has given us a tremendous improvement in figuring out critical dimensions, and a way to visualize how stuff fits together. We’ve spent the last 2 weeks refining different methods for grabbing and controlling the game pieces, and are pretty close to having a final design done!
We’re currently doing most of our physical prototyping on a spare chassis from last year, but we already have this year’s chassis built and almost ready to go. This will allow our software team to have a working testbed for prototyping algorithms while the rest of the team builds prototypes.
We also made a bunch of new jigs for the X-Carve, in preparation for component manufacture. We also have a series of planned upgrades to the X-Carve that would (hopefully) let us accurately machine VersaFrame tubing.
Sorry for the lack of pictures in this post, but rest assured, we’ll have some with our next update :)