okay so like i said last entry ill be leaving for three days, which means that i had to finish up some things today! i decided at this point that we were not going to able to mount a plate in the front for the intake (rip that idea and the whole bunch of filament we wasted on it 😭) so i spent the entire day pivoting on that idea and making the articulated suspension!!!! this was a really cool idea i talked with carlos about for like an hour, although we were thinking about only servos for suspension. this time around, i modified those servo mounts to place the head of of the edge of the main plate and used a bit of kevlar string Trina donated (ty Trina!) and tied it to the servo head and around the wheels hub. this means that when the servo is drawn up, the string pulls on the wheel, compresses the spring, and brings the robot down.
for context, there is an 8 inch height requirement* that we had yet to succesfully get under. by that i mean the robot was like 11in. so, to get around that, these servo mounts could effectively deactivate the suspension at will, not only making driving more stable in the ball collection phase, but also actually getting under the height requirement! (since it was only a starting height requirement, we were allowed to expand after)
anyways i made one mount, tested it, it didnt fully work, designed another and printed two of them, codexed while that was printing, tested one (it worked perfectly), printed 2 more, codexed the code for different states and positions for the servos and configuration stuff ofc, assembled the rest, tested all 4 of them out at the same time, actually tied good knots, and it was done by the end of the day!! im really proud of finishing this subsytem in one day before i left, it was suprisingly fun to see the robot dancing and doing pushups as it drove. and honestly, i think today really gave me that feeling of how incredible it is to see something like this just come to life, the way i feel when i make progress on a good coding project. i lowk want a 3d printer now… maybe that radish jam money could really come in handy…….