General Improvements

By Jayesh, Omar, Darshan, Max, Lin

Task: Perfect and improve multiple of our main characteristics of our robot

Iron Reign held its first Christmas break parade today and we decided to focus our time on making multiple small improvements, rather than adding one big part on our robot. Omar, Darshan, and I spent our time on rewiring and fixing our side motors. We found that one side was greatly lagging behind the other, so we tested to see which motor was failing, and rewiring the system fixed our driving system. We also cut out a long piece of Balsa wood to have a platform for our robot to making testing and machanical debugs easier. Needing space for our Churro catchers, we also cut holes in our front bumpers. Trace made a new moving cart for us that is much larger and sturdier. What's even more impress is that he made it without instruction (which he found later were right in front of him).

Reflections

We've spent a good amount of the last few practices on our big ideas, so before we move on to our next big part, taking time to perfect what we have is necessary to ensure that nothing breaks and throws off everything on the robot. Doing these small improvements helps prevent us from doing a lot less work in the future. The cuts in the front actually give us a form of a door flap that we can optimize for future use in our Churro Catchers. Cutting the platforms for the robot gave some trouble, due to the thickness of the wood and the need for us to make two triangular shaped holes for our motors.