6.270 Team 12  Design

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The Design

Initial Design – Z came up with an idea to shoot balls out so that we wouldn’t have to travel to score in

              scoring areas or voting areas.   The shooting idea finalized to something like the following picture: 

 

                                                                        Pros:  Takes less time to score/vote               Cons:  Harder to build and code                                                       

          Look Cooler                                                  Needs more servos and motors

          More Strategies                                                    Limited time

                                                                                 

The problems we came across with were that there seemed to be not enough room to fit the shooter and the ramp to the color sorter.  Also it was not very easy to put so many different things in one robot since none of us were good lego builders, it made our task more difficult.  After 2 days of working on this design, we only had the wheels, gear train, storage box for the red balls and the shooting wheels.  We didn’t know if we would have enough legos to put it all together much less make it stable.  At 11:00 pm on Thursday night we put it in the 1 sqr. foot box on the competition board and figured that … we couldn’t fit it all in 1 sqr. foot so we unhappily gave up our design. 

 

                       

Final Design -  So for the 2nd design we decided to go much simpler so we looked at the past year’s Humball and went with a ballgate.   Our ballgate goes up and down with two servos because one servo could not easily take upon the weight of the ballgate.  (too heavy on one servo is bad because when batteries are low, the servo won’t be able to function properly).  We have two motors on each geartrain (75:1) to have enough torque to carry the robot.  One castor wheel servo.  Here’s our design:

 

                                                                                     

 

 

Advice for the future:

-         don’t put a lot of weight on the castor wheel

-         don’t brace things that aren’t lego units

-         Don’t PLUG in rf receiver into the interface (:-p this is a common problem:-p)

-         Don’t use all your lego pieces :-p or else you’ll be digging for them

-         The rf sucks … don’t use it!!!

-         Interactive C doesn’t seem to like !=  (or that’s what we think)

-         BE VERY LUCKY!

-         Zap charge your handyboard during competition between rounds! (Have a Magician on your team otherwise :-p)