Although we had our robot working, we had some issues at the beginning of the year…
I was getting into the most advanced programming before last year ended for our robot, then when this year came, something bad happened. Our school’s cloud got cleared, which had the program for the robot. So… I am now having to rewrite everything because I forgot to backup the program to an external drive. Not just that, after I programmed just basic things to make the robot at least be able to move, a gear in a hard-to-reach area broke on the robot. I also had camp which made building difficult, and everything just went downhill… So I am unable to make the teaser at the moment, because I have to fix all the issues.
But anyways, that isn’t the topic for this post. Before the gears broke, I found out a strange way of shooting the stars, where the robot doesn’t have to extend in order to grab the stars. Basically, to start this off, you will have to wait for the teaser to see how it’s done, but we have a 2" area that one of the legs of the star goes into, then the catapult grabs the two legs on the top of the star and shoots them. This would mean no strength loss due to weak joints of having to extend, and this would mean you can have a serious fire rate of stars.
Seems like you’ve had a pretty rough sequence of events… but how long until you think you will release the teaser for it? I personally think you should just skip straight to the reveal.
The teaser will be moved forward a bit into school, sadly to say… I wish I could’ve posted it on 7/30/16, but a chain of events happened. Good thing it was only summer that the bad things happened though, but I am planning on having Andrew A. try to program for me instead of me doing everything to speed up the issue. I will try to post the teaser on 9/20/16, and sorry to say… I will be posting the reveal much later in the school year (probably after our first or second competition). The reason why is because we don’t want other people to literally copy our robot because atm, we found so many discoveries that nobody found yet, and we don’t want it to strike us back right before our competition starts.
Anyways, something very good happened to us a couple days ago.
It seems like Poison Arrow from Battlebots has sent stickers and a note to us(I wonder why ;)):
'Hey Connor!,
Thanks for supporting our team!
Here are some stickers for you and anyone you want to give them to! Keep working and come beat our robot! Start small, fail often, keep learning!
Thanks again and Kick Bot! All the team members signatures
[POISON ARROW]
I honestly did think Hypershock deserved to win, actually. Hypershock got so many hits on Poison Arrow, and I think if Hypershock got its’ drum to spin, they would really annihilate Poison Arrow.
Anyways, how many motors did you guys use for your catapults? We’re using 6, maybe 8 for faster shooting in the future.
We’re using 6 motors for launching. We are/were able to launch cubes from far zone to far zone using our dumpapult configuration, but it wasn’t fully optimized. As we do additional testing from now until our second competition in October, we plan on refining the mechanism with the goal of >= 1 star per second launching (To clarify, 3 stars with 3 second cycle time = 1 sps :P)
Our current configuration is a 4 motor catapult. We’ve found that 4 motors is enough for fairly efficient launching. Obviously as the season goes on we will make adjustments to find out what motor distribution actually is the most efficient. It sort of depends on what type of launcher you’re using. We are using a slip gear. What are you all using?
OH, ok. Have you tested that design against the other catapult designs? I really have a hard time believing that that is the most efficient method of shooting because it seems to require motors and when it’s accelerating, (assuming you are in fact still using rubber bands) the rubber bands are fighting the motors in order to accelerate them past the speed that they would output by themselves. Whereas with the slip gears and other mechanisms of the like, its just the rubber bands, not fighting anything. I’m curious to see how effective this design actually is when the reveal comes out because I’ve always dismissed it as inefficient.
I’m assuming that this isn’t the most efficient method, but the main reason why we’re doing this is for these reasons;
No need to waste motors for intake
Not enough space on our robot for rubber bands
Faster pullback for shooting again compared to the other shooting methods for this year
We have another reason that you have to wait to see the teaser/reveal
We aren’t using rubber bands, but that would be a good idea for us to try to do in order to remove the weight of the long piece of metal the motors have to turn.
