@kaylawong

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.

I started working on Hackpad and I followed the tutorial to create my PCB and CAD design for the container. I plan to make it Tamagotchi themed with four keys, the OLED display, and a rotary encoder. I used Onshape instead of Fusion to make the container.

i continued to work on the intake system, which we plan to do a roller and conveyor system to hold/intake the tennis balls. i found several components online and compiled them into a spreadsheet to check the costs. i ran into some issues, especially with figuring out how to pivot the entire conveyor while being able to secure the two plates so they move together.

earlier in the day, we switched out our ESCs so now our wheels can turn in both directions. we also tried flipping over the robot to see if that would allow for a greater chassis to wheel clearance. later, we brainstormed the next steps for our robot, especially the intake and shooter as well as the climb mechanism. i spent a lot of time creating geometry sketches for different ways we can shoot the tennis balls to fit within the size constraints. we ended up choosing to do a conveyor-like system and either magnets or a cascading system for climb.

we assembled all of our aluminum parts using rivets and tested our drive program. our wheels started to fall off because the 3d prints started to get looser on the motors, but we were able to successfully drive. although we only used our unidirectional ESCs, we were able to drive around by only going forward. the bearing pivot had issues as well, especially because when it rammed into cinderblocks it would get bent… but we were able to print containers for our electrical components (batteries, raspberry pi, arducam etc.). i was able to test my vision program to slalom around the cones, and it wasn’t exactly perfect but it was able to respond to obstacles.

after we 3d printed more wheels and glued rubber to the pla, we got to assemble our first iteration of our robot!! we used a cardboard box temporarily, but it was very flimsy so the motors/wheels weren’t very secure. right now, we are using unidirectional ESCs so we will hopefully get bidirectional ones so our robot can go backwards. i used ai to work on a vision program so that the robot would slalom around the red cones using the raspberry pi and arducam. also, our aluminum parts finally came in so tomorrow we will get to put together more parts

as a team we worked on figuring out the cad for our robot. i worked on making the l-brackets using onshape. we took inspiration from the hammerhead gobilda robot that had the front two wheels on an axle which would help us when navigating the obstacles on the course. i learned how to use new features on onshape, like the sheet metal model and the flange to make bends on the model.

we started brainstorming ideas for how our autonomous robot would look like and function. since our first goal is to just have a robot that can drive, we sketched out a drivebase and chassis. we also researched different materials, like motors, that we may need for the project. earlier, i used ai to develop a vision system on my computer to detect tennis balls.