A New Shooter!?!?!?: Week 3

Picking up where we left off from week 2, week 3 is full of crazy new changes like...A NEW SHOOTER!?!?!? Our original shooter design had one flywheel, but after considering how the spin of the ring after leaving this one-wheeled shooter might cause it to leave the shooter crooked, we added another flywheel. Drafting this new flywheel design on paper was essential since we had to hook both flywheels up to the same motor through a gear and chain system. Two of our team members took on this flywheel challenge while the rest continued building the wobble goal claw and making small tweaks and changes to the already built intake ramp and drive train.

Two of the team members mapped out the gears and sprockets for the flywheel's drive shift parallel system

The shooter with two flywheels is finished being built.

With the computer-aided design (CAD) of the wobble goal claw from last week, we quickly set to work building this system on the robot. attaching the parts together was easy enough, but the real trouble can when we tried making it move. The motor we used to lift the whole arm had to be powerful enough to lift the weight of the arm itself and the wobble goal. We also had to use a servo to power the claw's opening and closing around the post on the wobble goal. Luckily both were very simple to figure out, but it was an interesting adventure because we hadn't meddled much with motors and servos in our build so far.

Two team members tested the strength of the motor lifting the wobble goal claw and arm.

This is a huge update: WE'VE STARTED PROGRAMMING. With the drive train built and many of the other subsystems of the robot coming together, it was time to begin programming the robot and testing it out. We only dipped our toes into programming this week, but next week is sure to be full of all sorts of coding and testing.

Our primary programmer transfers some code to the control hub for the drive train.