Student Name: Jerico M.
Objective: What we did this week was agreeing upon what materials to use as our chassis, getting the actual materials we need and finalizing the model of our robot.
Procedure: This week we mostly gathered the materials we were going to use for each individual part of the robot. The first thing we did was disassemble the robot that we had used for the race to the wall challenge and discarded everything we didn’t need which was the switch, gears, chassis and other small stuff. We kept our wheels and motors since they worked pretty well for the race. The fact that we’re only deciding to have the motors in the wheels directly, we are saving so much space so that we can apply the falling ramps.
Since we’ve all decided that we are going to use falling ramps, the first thing we needed were the hinges to accomplish what we wanted. This goes back to Week 4, remember the DIY shop that I mentioned that week? I saw that they were selling these small door hinges too and so we all chipped in and looked for the loosest hinges they had in stock.
Now that we have these door hinges, the next thing were the ramps. We were looking for something metal that’s flexible yet somewhat sturdy. My group couldn’t find anything to use, luckily I stumbled upon the perfect material. I suddenly remembered where to get the exact kind of material that we were looking for. Luckily I found these thin sheet of metals that come with solderless breadboards which people just throw away. I looked and asked around in DIT and found three of them thrown away in one of the lab rooms.
These metals are actually the same size as one of the bigger breadboards you’d find but as you can see from the picture we have already shaped them to our liking. The ones shown in the picture are going to be our side ramps and the reason for the curved edges was to prevent them from getting stuck in the ground as a sharp edge would increase the likeliness of this happening. These are also very light so it will have little impact on the total weight of our robot. Since this metal was so thin, it was cut and shaped with a Stanley blade and the edges were then curved with a file.
The last thing we did was to use a different kind of mechanism for our wheels along with the chassis. Since we found other gears, we tried them out and see if we can still implement four wheels instead of our original plan of using two.
From this picture you can notice a lot of major differences between this build and the model I designed last week. One thing you can notice straight away from this picture are the gears and the tracks. At first this seemed like the better option because the tracks fit perfectly on the gears thus allowing all four of our wheels to move straight. The only problem was after testing this model out, we found that it’s very hard to keep the wheels and gears in line since we were using these rails as our chassis. Also, the tracks kept disconnecting from the gears when our robot moved too fast which was a vital problem. Now with the rails, the problem was it was hard to implement, it’s also a lot harder to manage since using these would make the chassis into different parts rather than just using one big chassis instead. It would also make the falling ramps on the sides impossible to do as the gears take up too much space.
Conclusion: From this week we are prepared to start building our robot. We even considered different ideas and tested them like the one above and we have come to a conclusion to stick to my original design. This week’s prime intention was mainly for decision-making between each member of our group. We have all agreed to the materials we’re going to use and how we’re going to apply them to our robot. This has been a very successful week for us because if you’ve noticed we are basically building our robot from house-hold items and scrap i.e rubber door stops, door hinges, solderless breadboard metals, etc…
I guess the main thing I’ve learned this week was that it’s best to concentrate on one design for our robot which was to go full-on offence rather than making it a bit of everything because this would just take up too much time. It actually ended up being a fun task to obtain these materials since I kind of went on my own little adventure and I got the exact stuff we needed for our idea of falling ramps.
Jerico Engineering Blogs 