Project Fair and Progress

Progress on my updated goal is underway.  The reason that I am continuing this goal of Reprogramming the autonomous mode is so we can use it at any season kick off events that we go to.  Progress is coming along slower than I wold like but I am making progress.  I have come up with the basic structure of how this new autonomous mode will work.  The way our pick up system works is we have two wheals that we run to suck the ball into the robot, we typically run these until the ball is all the way in the robot.  However through accidental testing (not running the wheals long enough during a match) we have found that we can hold the ball in our wheals while we are driving around.  The way it would work is we start with a ball in our robot and a ball behind us.  When autonomous starts we would drop our pickup arms down and run the wheals long enough to carry the ball with us as we drive forward to shoot.  When we get to were we want to shoot we would shoot the ball in our robot then pick the other one up and shoot it.  The only issue that I could possibly see involves how our shooter works.  To put it simply we have a catapult that is tensioned using clock springs.  To shoot we have a cam arm that can only run in one direction.  A cam arm is made up of two parts and (put simply) we move ours with a motor.  There are two different sections of the arm one is connected to the motor and one is connected to the catapult, they are both connected together with a bearing that can only move in one direction.  When the arm moves passed the lowest position the catapult springs up because of the clock springs (no pun intended).  The limiting factor in this entire plan for autonomous is how fast the motor can move the arm back to the fire position.  Other than that my proposed autonomous will most likely work.  If you have any questions about what I just said pleas leave a comment down below.

Recently my class had a 20 time project fair where we presented our projects. Not there completion but the goal that we are trying to achieve.  Below is a picture of the event.  The event was opened to the general public and lots of people came.  We stood at tables and presented our project ideas with any progress that we had made thus far.  All around it was a great event and it was a lot of fun to see what other students were working on.