Team 357 Royal Assualt will once again be using Blogger to document our progress throughout our build season. The URL for the blog is www.vrc357.blogspot.com
We have already begun testing drive trains using a previously built mecanum drive geared for speed and a new ‘west coast’ style of drive with the large 5" wheels.
To see all of the sack testing videos, go to the blog, but a few examples are below:
It does not currently. We may wrap a few zip ties around the center wheels to slightly increase the O.D. of the wheel. It was turning fairly well, but it could be smoother and I’m sure dragging the outer wheels wasn’t helping much.
What we did find though was that the 5" wheels handled the sacks pretty well. The sacks are definitely going to be an obstacle to teams that don’t keep in mind how many are on the field.
Thanks for the video post. One question. Why is the chassis metal frame so low to the ground? It looks as if you have at least another inch of metal below the axles and it also seems as if it gets hung up on the metal not the wheels. I would expect much better results with the raised frame.
Thanks for the question. We already had the mecanum drive together prior to Sack Attack being announced, so the team just gave it a shot and recorded their results. The results were that low frames will not work well in this game. They are now working on raising the frame to avoid sacks.
The 6 wheel drive could also be raised higher but the large wheels seemed to work well enough with the center hole pattern for the 5-hole C channel.
Just a concept that we are toying with right now, we found that 1/16" polycarbonate slides under the sacks extremely easy. See that attached photo. Collecting sacks using this method is much faster than using intake rollers from our testing.
i seriously think that blog/diary is a good idea, but all the other team members disagreed to the proposal, but i have been keeping a journal with detailed events of each meeting and each time we work, and i have filled a 500 page notebook in 6 months … it is lucky that we are on exam leave other wise there would be another 100 pages yet … but then only 2 weeks to go and we will start up again.
Yeh agreed, plus there is like a whole section of drawings ( i took graphics and i used the robotics drawings in my coursework :D) plus there is loads of notes from the last comp and pages upon pages of pseudocode in their … and the back 20 pages is like dates and hours that we have worked
I’ll make sure to get a video of it sometime this week, meetings have been far and few in-between with it being the end of the school year and whatnot.
This is great stuff. Honestly, if we didn’t document what we do on at least a weekly or bi-weekly basis, I would forget some of it and I know the students on our team would too. Plus I think it’s really cool to see where you started and where you ended and see how different your end product became.
when we were talking to the judges at the competition for gateway, the main exhibit was the book, it was damaged, teared pages etc but they really liked it … and i had print outs of our facebook group and skype call historys inbetween the group (do group conversations at least once per week) … they were really impressed, gave us an energy award
That’s a good question. I think on this type of intake that the students made, the prongs of the intake were able to grab more of the sack when it was at an angle. If your initial contact is more in the center of the sack and whatever you’re using to agitate the sack can theoretically contact more of the sack, it should be easier to pick up.
We are straying away from intakes at the moment for pure sack acquisition. We’ve found the scoop or spatula design to be much quicker for both pickup and delivery. More on that to come.
I forgot what the video was called, but in gateway worlds, there was a team that was able to lift their rollers to give a very fast dispensing system. If you incorporate this you can have the fast pickup,delivery, and driver friendly de-scoring.
The Spur-Flys are team 21, and one of the most successful programs in VRC. They’ve been at World Champs every year since at least 2009, and have been WC Finalists. I like their evil butterfly, too.
… it is lucky that we are on exam leave other wise there would be another 100 pages yet … but then only 2 weeks to go and we will start up again.
