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kaylawong

@kaylawong

Joined July 9th, 2026

  • 26Devlogs
  • 4Projects
  • 1Ships
  • 23Votes
class of 2027 !!
Ship Pending review

Alongside a team of 2 other high schoolers, I helped to make a robot that can intake balls, shoot balls, and navigate across an obstacle course. It was originally intended to be autonomous, but we wanted to focus more on the mechanical systems that were on the robot. I was in charge of designing and assembling the intake subsystem. It was very challenging to fit within the design constraints that we were provided but it was very rewarding once I saw my CAD come to life! This was my first time having something I designed online turn into something physical, so I was very surprised that when all my parts got shipped that it all came together nicely. I did this under a summer program in collaboration with Stardance called Definity Education Summer Camp and it was fun going through trial and error to see what worked and didn’t work. The hardest part was definitely having to make everything from scratch and not buying pre-made FTC or VEX parts, like getting our sheet metal manufactured was a risk in itself! But it was totally worth it.

  • 21 devlogs
  • 65h build
Video of Project → See source code →
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44m 21s logged

i just updated our limit switch arm because it ended up snapping!! i thickened the arm and i also included a filleted part to prevent it from snapping so easily. that’s it for today!!

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1h 24m 3s logged

i finally have a good idea on how to slice for bambu printers!! i did a lot of 3d printing today, and i started by reprinting the side funnel walls :yay: . i also helped to make an attachment so that the limit switch would be pressed once the intake has pivoted past a certain point, to make sure it doesn’t touch the ground. it is definitely not the best solution but i was able to make it work with a bunch of tape and 3d print iterations !!

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1h 21m 35s logged

we finally got our intake and shooter to work! i mostly helped by tensioning the neoprene rubber strips and using rubber glue to secure it. earlier, i was trying to make a 3d print to make it easier to cut the rubber strip so that it can be cut at an angle, allowing me to overlap the rubber without making the conveyor too thick. however, that didn’t end up working because the rubber was difficult to cut, so we just decided to glue one on top of the other. one issue we ran into was that on the overlapped portion, it would jam into the pulley for the shooter. this was eventually fixed by cutting the part of the rubber conveyor that was too thick and would hit the pulley! with the extra scraps of rubber that i messed up on, i made a little dude with scissors :blobby-scissors:

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41m 31s logged

I made the base of the website, with some buttons on the side and a way to capture photos. I am still trying to figure out how to get a different photo for each frame on the photostrip, so hopefully I can get to that. I want to later be able to make it so that people can download their photostrip and change the designs as well!

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2h 13m 12s logged

i had to take apart and reassemble the intake because the pulleys were on the wrong side… since the pulley on the motor shaft doesn’t fit over the set screw on the shaft, the final belt had to be on the opposite side, so i had to take everything apart :’) my teammate attached the shooter system onto the intake after i was done, so our robot is finally coming together!!

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4h 8m 48s logged

i worked on assembling the intake, which was mostly the last part of the day today. we got our metal parts in the afternoon ish, so earlier in the day i was working on the guides to funnel the balls into the intake. i also continued refining the cad so now it looks like this!! the intake itself is working decently okay, i have to attach the motor tomorrow. one problem is that i have to wrap around the rubber onto the conveyor, otherwise there is no contact from the rollers on the conveyor to the tennis balls.

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1h 52m 56s logged

on friday and today, i mounted the 3d prints to the shafts to start assembling the intake. i was struggling to attach a lot of these parts to the shafts because a layer of the prints kept on stopping the shaft from going all the way through. someone else had to hammer the parts onto the shafts in order for it to work :’) we’re still waiting on our metal part that will contain all of our intake parts, but we do have other components printed. our rollers were printed using TPU, and we also got our pulleys and shaft collars finished as well. we also have very very colorful filament now!!

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3h 26m 39s logged

yesterday i worked on making the shaft collars and pulleys to print out. our pulley prints were not very successful, but the shaft collars turned out great. i downloaded a free shaft collar file from this link and i changed the size of the screw hole, the width, and i adjusted it so there were two flat ends (so we could use a screw and nut). my team also cut the shafts so we can start making our intake

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4h 48m 30s logged

today i iterated more on the design of the intake. after printing the pulleys, we realized the belt was slipping and skipping teeth on the pulleys because we were using GT2 belts. we’re now pivoting to HTD-5M belts so we can hopefully not have any slipping happen on our intake. we also ordered more parts and added them to our purchase list!! when the sheet metal comes, we will be able to test the fit of bearings and other parts as well.

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3h 39m 6s logged

here’s an update on what the robot has been doing! i haven’t been working much on the driving part, so my teammates did a majority of figuring out how to navigate the course and how to drive. our robot was able to make it over the hill (but it flipped over if you watch the video lol). i am still working on the intake, but i have gotten further by printing out some pulleys and some shaft to bearing attachments we might use on the robot. tomorrow we will hopefully order sheet metal to hold our intake system. also, one of our prints turned into a blob

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3h 0m 1s logged

some of our parts for the intake arrived, so i was able to design more parts of our intake around it. i adjusted the rollers and came up with two different iterations, depending on the width of the rubber we will use to wrap around the rollers. i also measured the diameter of the hex shafts that arrived, which let me test printing out GT2 gears. i edited the gear by finding a part on McMaster-Carr and cutting out the hex shape and chopping off the extruded portion.

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2h 55m 32s logged

I added an animation at the bottom of the page which will lead to other pages to my website. It took me awhile to figure out how to hide the polaroids behind the head, and then animate them to pop out. Eventually, I learned to use inline-block instead of a flexbox to allow me to move around the divs behind the head. I drew all of these assets in Procreate, including the pattern in the background (which I updated to a dotted comic pattern) and the Spider-Girl that I made blue (since it’s my favorite color). I also added some hover effects and updated the cursor so that the cursor turned into a red spider when something is clickable. The polaroids go from grayscale to color when you hover over them as well.

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50m 56s logged

I added more to the landing page of my website, to go along with the script from Spider-Man into the Spiderverse. I added some hover animations as well, for the images that are displayed. It was challenging to figure out the spacing and using flexboxes, but it’s starting to come together! I will add the other pages for my next devlog hopefully.

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40m 42s logged

I started making my Spider-Man themed portfolio!! I sketched out a design on Procreate and designed the top part of the website. I used a comic font from the internet to make the intro text and I animated the name tag in the center of the page. I will next add the bottom of the website where people can click on different pages about me.

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2h 17m 28s logged

i worked on our shooter design, coming up with different ways to get the tennis balls into a bucket while fitting into our size constraints. especially with having a pivot on our intake, having the motors for the flywheels in the back would add too much weight, so i am still figuring out how to get that to work. i am testing out different orientations for the motors and flywheel, such as a dual horizontal flywheel shooter and a single flywheel shooter.

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3h 6m 24s logged

today, i worked on editing our parts that will be machined for our intake. instead of making it three pieces, we realized we could just bend one large piece of metal. for the motor mount, i added a way to allow it to tension so that when we add belts, we can adjust accordingly. i also ordered all the parts we need for the intake system, including the shafts, motor, bearings, etc. lastly, we also started planning out how our shooter would work, which we chose to do two flywheels at the end of the conveyor.

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2h 46m 26s logged

i mostly researched different parts to purchase and further refined how the intake would work. to run the conveyor, one motor would power the first roller, then the rest would be connected by pulleys and belts. i also added a motor mount to the side plate of the intake. for the chassis itself, i extended the base plate and L-brackets so that it would be 15x15 inches, which was one of the constraints.

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4h 37m 33s logged

yesterday i worked on combining our intake system with a pivot. i realized that there was very little space between both motors, so i moved the pivot between where two motors are, where a shaft would be placed under the intake. however, in order to fit under the 8 inch limit, the pvc pipes would have to be smaller or the walls of the intake would have to be shorter. i also started putting other components into the CAD, including the bearings, pipes, and pulleys that might be on the robot. lastly, i tried to modify the bottom pan of the robot’s frame to allow for the intake to turn downwards at a more drastic angle.

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3h 40m logged

today, my teammates and i first worked on getting the 3d printed center parts of our wheels to fit. the pneumatic wheels were really difficult to work with, especially because the prints weren’t fitting on perfectly (it took us like 1-2 hours). while the others worked on driving with the new wheels and drafting the climbing mechanism, i worked on designing our intake and shooter. i made a 3d model and a geometry sketch to figure out how the pivot would work and how our motors would be mounted. i eventually landed on this design that i will edit more tomorrow.

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