by The Hitchhikers | Mar 2, 2018 | Build season
Week 6 was spent getting everything ready before for the end of build season. During this week, our main goals were to rebuild our carriage, which broke at the end of Week 5 during testing, and spend time calibrating our code. Thankfully, none of our leads got sick during this week, so things ran a little smoother!
This time around, we were able to rebuild our carriage with the design changes in three days! While it was not enjoyable and did nothing good for our health to have our carriage break at the end of Week 5, in the end, our carriage ended up better than it was! Needless to say, we are extremely happy (and relieved) about that!
On the day of Bag and Tag, we were able to meet at one of our student’s church. The room they lent to us gave us much more space to actually test our robot. Finally, we were finished with testing and our 2018 robot, Grunthos, was bagged and tagged!
Now we are powering up for our first competition at the Pitt County District Event on March 9-11!
by The Hitchhikers | Feb 15, 2018 | Build season
Over the past four weeks, we have run into a few problems: bad weather, equipment breaking, and illness to name a few. Fortunately, we did not panic and remained on schedule through hard work and diligence. This week, we had another problem. We hoped that we would be able to power through it and stay on schedule, but it was not to be the case. At the beginning of Week 5, one of our co-captains got sick, so he had to miss the entire week. Just like when our Robot Lead was sick, we were able to manage without one of our co-captains, but it was not a fun situation to be in again.
In addition to illness, we also had a few difficulties with our cube collector and cube delivery system, which is an elevator. Early on this week, the main part of the elevator was mounted on our robot. All that was left was to finish building the carriage. Unfortunately, we messed up up that small, essential part at least three different times during its construction. Finally, after several lessons were learned, it was complete and ready for testing!
As we were testing the system near the end of the week, it unexpectedly came crashing down. Hard. Needless to say, that crash was disastrous, breaking and bending parts of the system. As a result, we had to fix parts of the system and completely reconstruct the carriage. We did panic a little at the prospect of having to rebuild the carriage because it took us so long the first time, but we changed the design and some of our best students working on it! The design modification will also be more durable and fix our problem with the cube collector, killing two birds with one stone. We are optimistic that we will have it finished before bag and tag! Looking at it even more optimistically, we are grateful that it broke now rather than breaking it at competition and trying to fix it then!
We have also been having some complications with weight. Some of the robot parts are quite heavy, so we have had to keep a close eye on our weight. A couple of times, we have had to make small modifications to keep within the weight limit. At the end of the week, we were under the limit, so we should be good!
by The Hitchhikers | Feb 11, 2018 | Build season
Week 4 was spent fine-tuning our cube collector, finishing up the fabrication and assembly of our cube delivery system, adding encoders to our wheels, and working on the climbing aspect of the game. Fortunately, our Robot Lead was able to return early on in Week 4, helping things tremendously.
For the cube collector, we tweaked the design slightly. Originally, we had four wheels for the collector, but we got rid of the back set of wheels because the cube kept getting stuck at an angle on them. There was also a bolt that limited the range of motion for one of our collector arms. After some testing, we were able to identify and fix both problems. We also added something to help us retain the cube better. Before, we had problems retaining the cube in the collector when we picked the robot up and shook it around to simulate the rough driving during a match. At first, we tried increasing the tension in the springs used for the cube collector. While it helped, we decided that we wanted to have that extra security.
On the programming side, we outlined the three auto codes needed as well as worked on various aspects. Electrical is getting worked on, and we have started the long process of making buttons, introducing our new students to the joy of button making! We also submitted the write up for the Woodie Flowers Award.
During this week, Team 6003, SUM, visited our build space. SUM needed gearboxes because the ones they ordered, which they really needed for their chassis, were on backorder. To help them out, we invited them to our build space to take the gearboxes from our 2016 robot. While they were taking apart our 2016 robot, we were able to talk to them. It was extremely fun to compare notes on how build season was going for our respective teams!
by The Hitchhikers | Feb 1, 2018 | Build season
One of the big focuses of Week 3 was to finish our chassis and most of the other functions of the robot. Another focus of this week was to stay healthy!
This week, we have accomplished a lot in the building of our robot. However, we did not do so well in our goal of staying healthy. Quite a few of our students had to stay home due to illness. One of the students that got sick was our Robot Lead. While we were able to manage well without him, it was unfortunate to lose him for the week.
Health problems aside, at the end of Week 3, we had a finished chassis and cube collector, leaving us to continue working on what we call the “banana” for the climbing aspect of the game and our cube delivery system. Since our programmers had all of the parts coded that they could already, we were able to take our robot out for testing as soon as it was ready!
On the business side of things, we finalized the shirt and button designs. Now we just need to get started on the process of ordering them. We have also been making mice and babel fish for the competitions and writing up the Woodie Flowers Award submission.
Overall, it has been a productive week filled with fun. All of our new students are getting extremely involved with the team, and we are continuing to have high spirits despite the cold!
by The Hitchhikers | Jan 24, 2018 | Build season
Week 2 started out like any other week. With high spirits and a lot of teamwork, we were on schedule and having loads of fun! Unfortunately, starting on Wednesday, we were unable to meet for three days because of the ice on the roads. While this was definitely unfortunate for our team, there was a bright side to the whole situation. Firstly, we extended one of the meetings before the snow and ice hit. Secondly, we used the days we were stuck inside to wait for parts to arrive and to continue to work on spirit and marketing aspects. Of course, we also used the “break” and the cold as an excuse to enjoy a cup of tea! In the end, it almost evened out, and we went back to work at Magrathea (our build space) on Saturday.
Once the roads had cleared, we thought that things would return to normal. We were wrong. We had problems right at the start of our first meeting back. One of the holes for our chassis was not lining up with another hole. This would not usually be a huge problem, but redoing the part was not an option for us. Fortunately, we were able to salvage the error, but we had to make sure the problem did not occur again. The manufacturing error caused quite a bit of confusion as we were not sure what had gone wrong. We were positive everything was done properly as far as measurements and use of the tools goes. After some investigation, we realized that our drill press was broken. This news was not too surprising because we have had that drill press since the establishment of our team in 2010. While we did buy and set up a new and better drill press in time for the start of Week 3, we did lose quite a bit time pausing some of our building endeavors.
Despite those problems, we are on schedule and ready to finish the chassis and the rest of the robot!
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