off-road autonomous robot

7/22 - not much we can do about it

much of today was spent moping about how everything would be arriving tonight (and of course the belts are arriving tomorrow night, one of the parts that is literally necessary to drive the thing at all). so much of today was spent just trying to design, cad, and otherwise figure out details for the legs before we actually had the components necessary to make them. i spent some time with one of my teammates figuring out where specifically the springs for the legs are gonna go, and he made a quick 3d printed rod-end that’ll hold in the shaft that acts as the spring dowel. we also planned out where we could put the legs’ pivot point on the chassis and just generally planned every element of assembly that we could. this also involved figuring out last second that i had no idea how we were gonna mount the springs and chassis on the leg at all and that my teammates didn’t know too much either, but its cool we figured it out and started the print by the end of the day 👍

attached: us figuring out where we’re gonna mount both the leg and the spring on the chassis and me drawing the top view of all the drive train stuff going on inside the leg (ignore my horrible handwriting its the board i swear)

7/21 - EVERYTHING GOT DELAYED

VERY BAD NEWS: every single thing we needed to order for the drive train and suspension got delayed by a day 😭
anyways completely unrelated but the second competition is being moved to thursday, cause we cant drive through the course with literally 0 suspension
the first 2 hours of today was spent rushing out an onshape sketch to get our metal legs cut by Lucas cause he (reasonably enough) wanted the drawing by 11 before he left the shop. i had to remember how to do drawings, with a lottt of help from carlos. unfortunately, i forgot the holes for the spring on the top so we’ll have to figure that eventually. i also forgot to put holes that would make screwing in the motor remotely possible but lucas the GOAT put those in for us. could not appreciate it more
we might be lowk cooked now, cause the bearings say they’re gonna arrive thursday night so we may not even have the robot driving again until next week 😭😭
that being said we ball‼️

also ill be posting a devlog every weekday now cause i need to journal every day anyways
attached below are 2 of the legs we got cut with the motors on them

so i may have forgotten to make a project when we started this a week ago

but! the motors and camera are all connected successfully to the pi and it has a gh repo set up with a Codex’d ball/cone detector that automatically drives the motors (or manually with a usb xbox controller clone). all we need now is for the sheet metal chassis we designed friday to arrive and the bidirectional ESCs we ordered to replace the small and kinda inconsistent generic ESCs we have now