Week 13

Date: 12/6/18 Time: 4:30-6:30pm

Week #: 13

Quick Summary:

• We built an extending arm that gets minerals out of the crater.
• We have a strong, secure holder for the phone that goes on the robot.
• Our lift mechanism keeps stripping.

What We Accomplished: We have decided that since we keep running out of minerals on the field, we need to build something that will allow us to get minerals from inside the crater. So we built an extending arm that has something like a hand on the end of it that grabs minerals from the crater and drags them out. One servo motor controls the arm part that extends and retracts, and another servo motor controls the hand part that goes up and down. We experimented with different arms and settled on the lightest one. Our first arm was 72.3 grams, and it was too heavy for the servo motor. It wouldn’t lift it back up. So we lightened the arm by reconstructing it with fewer pieces, and the weight was 32.2 grams. Because we added the sliding arm, we had to move the team marker flicker to the other side of the robot. We also replaced the two small zip ties on the bucket with one longer zip tie in the middle of the bucket. This reduced the number of minerals that was thrown into a wrong bucket on the lander. Luke 3-D printed a phone case that is secured to the robot. This case is amazing because it is super secure.

Our Problems: We are having problems with our lift mechanism. The metal gear is stripping out the plastic gear track, which means we can’t latch. Because our next competition is in two days, we have temporarily fixed the problem by replacing the gear track.