The lathe we bought to replace our aging and well-worn Craftsman has arrived. The truck showed up last Tuesday with no warning, requiring some quick cleanup of our shop to get ready for the new machine. The new lathe is a Grizzly G4003G. We bought the gunsmith version because it comes with tools that are useful for longer parts, such as a steady rest and a follow rest.

Although it was a bear of a job bringing the half ton machine into the shop, the Grizzly is now at home, and after some wiring and TLC, will be up and running in time for the new season.

We are pleased to announce that our team has received the 2012 Web Site Excellence Award! We want to thank everyone for their input, support, and interest in our team and FIRST. When we decided to build this website, we wanted it to be user-friendly, full of great content about our team and FIRST, and made a commitment to improve our website as often as possible. In the near future, we hope to add more content to our website, such as manuals, videos/animations, and PowerPoint presentations using Adobe Presenter 7 in order to make them more interactive.

Our team only sees this website progressing, and we hope you feel the same way as well! As always, if you have any suggestions or comments about our website, please feel free to contact us via the Contact Us Form. We truly appreciate your support and interest in our team and wish you many good build-seasons to come!

Build Season is officially over! Whew!

Yesterday’s Part 3 post explains many of our accomplishments and issues with the current state of the robot. We are now compiling three lists.

1. What parts we need to buy to complete our second robot

2. What we will be doing as soon as we get to Davis (our first competition)

3. What we will be doing between now and Davis.

We will be posting updates every few days from now until competition about the status of the second robot. We will also be posting several updates during our Davis and SVR competitions, so remember to visit again soon!

Below is a gallery of over 150 images of the robot that we bagged. This documentation (along with hundreds over other photos and many videos) will allow up to closely replicate this robot and give us insight for future years. Note that we did take off the shooter component and mount it to the second robot before it was bagged as a part of our 30 pounds we get to keep out of the bag to work on. We will not be changing the shooter much, but rather, it will help us complete our look up table (discussed in previous posts) which will enable us to automatically make baskets.

We weigh a max of 108.2 pounds. This is with two bridge tippers on the robot. We will be taking some things off and adding other parts. We are good on weight!

I am writing this Part 3 update at 5:39 on the last day, and can say that things have been alright. Things got wild when we realized we blew our digital side car, and had to spend a fair amount of time rewiring the entire robot.

Our Fisher Price motors also get extremely warm after just a few minutes of use (barely enough for one match). Conceivably, this is because the heat sink holes are located in the front of the motors. This is unfortunate as they are mounted up against a plate, which blocks those holes.

Another problem we are facing is that the bane-bot motor’s pinion continuously comes loose. We have tried using locktight and even created a new set-screw hole. We will see how this plays out. This third motor provides the power necessary to launch balls much farther than the key, which will be greatly useful.

Part 2 of our videos and photos from the last few days of build! We got the shooter successfully launching with precision. The below videos are without any encoders, potentiometers, etc. We are manually aiming. We will soon complete the lookup table.