Today was mainly a machining day. The drive train base is coming together (pictures coming soon). Our plan is to have it almost done by the end of tomorrow so we can get it welded on Monday.

We also did some wood working to build some mounts for a special project. More details coming soon. In the process, we taught freshmen students how to use some power tools.

Today, we figured out how to calculate the robot’s distance give the webcam’s field of view (66 degrees). Simple trigonometry was quite helpful in this calculation!

We continued machining the robot and now almost have a basic frame. We also made our large purchase order today from AndyMark, McMaster, etc. They should arrive soon.

The tarped up backboard structure.

Today, we made significant progress on code. It is now running a lot faster. We will post a video tomorrow of how fast it is. It looks as though it is essentially a real-time video. We brought in two other ideas on how to calculate the robot’s distance from the target. Earlier, we calculated the ideal launching speed and angle given the ‘x’ distance away. Below is a picture of one way to account for skew. The other two ideas involve projected geometry.

As you can probably tell by the pictures, we continued machining the drive-train and sent out complex parts to be machined. The basic frame is coming together. Later this week we plan on getting the pieces welded together.

Today, we continued machining the drive train for the two robots. Things slowed down a little bit, as you can probably tell by the shorter posts.  We got some cool equations to detect “z” distance from the target from just one camera.

We plan on getting welds done later this week. Also, there was some wind during the day and our tarp came off of our basket ball hoop structure. Luckily we put it back before the next rainstorm.

We found some nice photogate sensors that we plan on using to detect when balls come into our robot.  We made it into a ball counter so it adds 1 when a ball comes in and subtracts 1 when a ball leaves the robot.

The webcams we are using

The drive-train is being built!

Today we modified our bridge tipper and combined the two ideas of a pneumatic and a stiff angle. Our tipper will begin inside the robot and rotate outwards. We tested a prototype bridge tipper (see video below). It is simply an angled block. It actually worked quite well.

In the programming world, we bought new Microsoft webcams. Unfortunately, they do not come with SDK. Therefore, our programmers are vigorously building their own custom SDK to program the webcams with. Currently, we are using C#.

Our robot design is almost complete. We decided to use two wheels for the main launcher. This will allow us to have more stability as we are not tangent to the center of the ball when it is in contact with the wheel(s).

We also looked at a new lathe as our old (WWII era) lathe has been only semi-functional for a few years.

Taking apart the old robot!

Working on the prototype!