Top-down view of Ryon Labs with Team ORyon and the Discobots
Prototyping: We finished the wide drive train below. It is designed to lock in and traverse over the bump and totes. A lift would be placed on top of this so we could lift the totes or cans and stank them one by one as they are placed by other teams. We stayed up till 2:00 AM tinkering with it to make it drivable! The electrical team wired up a test board using pre-2015 components and a VEX Cortex to run this prototype.
Above, our prototype wide robot. Below, electrical team finishes the test board.
- We decided to make the frame of our lift out of REV rail (instead of aluminum tubing).
- The design of our manipulator will likely dictate the exact dimensions of our lift so the CAD team is working on that first. The placement of our lift will determine the locations of gearboxes and electronics.
- We have three competing designs for manipulator- currently they are all U-shaped frames with hooks for the totes and recycling containers. They all have similar shapes and work in similar ways, but have different dimensions.
- Our manipulator will not be lifted with chain, but instead by roller assemblies that will be dragged up and down the REV rail- this gives our lift more stability than using just chain, and adds only a little bit more weight.
- We may prototype a four-bar to see if it performs better than a linear lift, but based on the designs of Team ORyon (and other RI3D teams), we believe that a linear lift will work well.
Programming: Plugged in basic tank drive code into the drive train. New programmers continued writing practice code from yesterday with the new libraries. The focus was on PID Control and pneumatics. Afterwards, they wrote code for a prototyping board that will test experimental drive trains and lifts.