Monday, January 19, 2015

Day 17

       Today was an interesting day for our team. We had school off for Martin Luther king Jr day, but none of the mentors were available, so we could not work in our shop. Instead, we went and worked in the most quintessential Seattle location, a Starbucks. 

As we did not have access to a shop, we worked on CAD all day. At the mercy of the few outlets available, we worked from 10:00 to 4:00 designing parts to be machined at intellectual ventures.

The roller intake team even finished their wheel housing, which will be mounted at the end of an arm off the front of the robot.

After that, we got to stress-testing components of the elevator, as questions had been raised as to the possible flexing it could experience.

Here it is with a hypothetical support on top and in the middle, and a fifty pound load on top. (the bending is exaggerated by the software)
Close-up:

Here is an elevator mock up, created so we could more accurately test the loads a real version would experience, it was also created with 2x1 inch box aluminum.
As the blue indicates, flex does not appear too bad, but the stress around the rollers seems a bit high, so we will have to figure out how to engineer around that.

We look forward to a meeting in our real shop tomorrow and we look to be on track to finish the robot design in the next week.

GO ROBOTOTES!