Improvements to Churro Catcher and Ramp

By Jayesh, Lin, Omar

Task: Make improvements to Churro Catcher and Ramp and make blog more accessible

Iron Reign held our first of two meetings before the New Year season to concentrate on improving our main designs to ensure they worked as expected. Starting with our Churro Catcher, we found that as the motor moved the two arms down, the tension in the two churro climbers was two low to actually push out the latches forward from the robot. We built two small metal segments that ensured the two long strips didn't get pushed out and that tension transferred to the lower part of the wire, fixing the problem and pushing out the strips to the desired range. Relating to the intake system, we found that as the blocks were pushed up the ramp, on rare occasion, they would become stuck on the side beams of the robot. Realizing this, we cut out small cardboard pieces and inclined them on the ramp, covering the side beams and they acted as guides to the offending blocks, pushing them back on to their desired course.

Reflections

Our usual strategy of designing our main aspects of the robot, and then spending time to perfect them saves us a lot of future time wasted. Once we finished up the ramp and churro systems, we immediately set to figuring out what was wrong with each system. Finding the errors, in this case the blocks falling on the side and the incorrect spread of tension in the strips, we can add or take away certain things to perfect our design. With these two scoring mechanisms done, we now need to concentrate on distributing our weight on the robot and ensuring our churro catchers can actually help us climb the field ramp. With our first qualifiers fast apporaching, we need to concentrate on what we can do well and make those things secure in our strategy.