Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Well that was a fail.

     We were supposed to have 90% of our robot complete today. It didn't go so well.

     We were really rushing to get it all together, and it seemed close ... but then the top axles just wouldn't go into place. Extremely frustrated, we couldn't figure out what had gone wrong.

   After class, we tried to troubleshoot the problem. The model at first looks fine:


     But on closer inspection, you can see that the bottom of the L-blocks, and even some of the bottom of the double motor, lie inside the acrylic body, which is clearly contradictory.


     This must have happened when we realized we had the wrong gear size. When we changed the gears, Solidworks moved the shafts and motor down, given the mates already made. The transparent acrylic helped to hide the problem and none of us saw the problem until we assembled the machine.

     We've decided to mill an indented area into the acrylic body for the motor to rest a little lower and to mill the bottom of the angle supports. So we are definitely behind. However, we are making a list of things we need to complete, and, even though there isn't much time, we are going to proceed carefully. It would be easy to rush everything and thus overlook things or make dreadful mistakes, as well as grow impatient with each other, but this would hurt us more than spending more time being methodical.

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