Student Name: Jerico M.
Objective: The goal this week was to build on the final design that every member of our group agreed on, which was basically the model I created two weeks ago.
Procedure: The first problem we addressed was finding a way in order to prevent our motors from moving out of place like last time (race to the wall challenge). We’ve learned from our mistakes so this time we’re using wood as our chassis. The first thing we did was create an indentation so that our motors would fit perfectly into the wood as shown below.
The reason for using wood was that it’s the type of material that would prevent our motors from moving when crafted properly and is an easily accessible material. We also decided that it’s best to use wood as we can simply drill holes for neat wiring management. Now the next thing we did after was to drill holes for our sensors. We decided that we were going to use four reflective sensors two being the front sensors and the other two being the back sensors. We only drilled two holes for the front sensors as we were still unsure whether we had enough pins since we already had two motors using up some of the input pins along with the four sensors. As you can see from the image below, by drilling holes for our sensors we saved space, we were unsure whether we were going to use one or two sensors for the back, so we just left them out.
The same image also shows that we’ve implemented hinges, which bring us to our next topic. As I explained in Week 8, we were planning to have falling ramps, the key component in order to carry this out was the hinges. We just super glued them to the wooden chassis and heavily taped metal struts to angle the ramps to our liking, which also prevents us from touching the ground thus still keeping our robot in the 10x10cm restriction.
The final thing we agreed on was that our robot is going to start each round standing upwards and as soon as it moves it will fall down as shown on the left image, making the hinges fall and making our ramps come out. Another thing you can notice is that there’s no hinge at the front, instead we have a metal ramp. We decided that this was the best path to follow since we can have really long ramps and take control of a big portion of the battle ring without exceeding the 10x10cm limits since the measurements that will be taken are from the initial form of the robot i.e standing up position.
Jerico Engineering Blogs 