Student Name: Jerico M.
Objective: The goal required this time was to obtain the most essential components needed for the race before the race commences.
Procedure: This week it was all about looking for good places to buy the goodies we were looking for, which were the motors and the wheels. After spending quite a while on a laptop looking for motors, we found this little beast right here. Now as a group, we decided that the motors and maybe the wheels were the only things we were going to spend money on as we’ll be making the rest of the robot ourselves. We didn’t want to spend too much so we got this one, it had decent torque and speed for the price.
Here are the Pros and Cons of the motor we got:
As you can see the pros of the motor are pretty straight forward, the fact that the motor is very light and very small this gives us an advantage as we won’t have to worry about it exceeding the 500 grams and 10x10cm limits of the challenge.The price was also reasonable in relation to the specs it had to offer and we were able to order it without hassle. The only cons to this was the shipping price, although the motors were nothing too extraordinary, the shipping was pretty demanding, also we didn’t know exactly when they would arrive so we wouldn’t be able to build our robot as we would need all of our components first.
After that was done, we then decided as to what wheels to get. I instantly knew where to look and let my teammates know and so we searched for wheels around city center. After a good two hours we finally found the wheels of our dreams! It was exactly what we wanted as we were searching for wheels with rubbery material for good traction. We ended up buying four door stops like the one below.
It was nothing too special really but we were happy with this as we would be able to use these wheels for both the race to the wall and the competition itself. The wheels also didn’t end up being too heavy so it was a plus.
Conclusion: Since I’m not really the best at coding, this week I believe that I finally contributed a lot more to both the group and the project itself. I recommended all of the good websites for motors such as Jsumo, Maplin, Amazon & Ebay. Jsumo was specifically for robot building so it was very handy! I also became the tour guide of our team while looking for the wheels as my classmates weren’t familiar with town at all! I thought of good places to attempt to get our wheels such as Toymaster, Smyths and Maplin yet we had no luck until we passed a hardware/DIY store. That was pretty much everything we had done this week, it may not seem a lot but it took us very long to find.
Jerico Engineering Blogs 