Investing in a CNC Router

By Bhanaviya

Task: Invest in a CNC router using our grants from the previous season.

Last year was a very successful season for Iron Reign, financially speaking. We earned around $11,000 in grants and funding from FIRST in Texas, Texas Workforce Commission and Mark Cuban, to name a few sponsors. In addition, this year we received a $200 Gobilda product grant. Most of this money was invested in last season's expenses. But as we found out over the course of our build season, our team incorporates a wide number of 3D-printed parts into our robot, and especially since we were recognized for our design process at the Houston World Championship through Innovate Award Finalist, our design process was one that we could further improve now that we've seen the level of competition at Worlds. Part of this includes using a variety of materials, as illustrated in previous seasons where we've used ice-cube trays and turkey-coolers into our robot's subsystems. So, what better way to improve our design process and spend our grant money than in investing in a CNC router?

The router itself cost around $3000, and while this isn't cheap, it's a good investment since it now allows to cut our parts out of durable, inexpensive materials like aluminum and wood. So far, we have plans to use the router on the mounting under the turn-table of our robot and a logarithmic spiral that is being modeled to reduce the torque on our linear slide system. There's no end to how much this router can influence our overall design process. Our team is used to using Ninjaflex-printed parts but with the router, we can be more creative with the use of 3D-modeled parts on our robot.

Next Steps

Now, we can begin cutting the above-mentioned parts on the router once they've been fully modeled. We can also begin deciding what other parts need to be modeled that can easily be cut on the router.