In light of our recent acquisition of sponsors – as well as the need to display our team number – we plan to construct a frame for our robot, where we'll mount two big sheets of plexiglass. This serves two ever-useful functions: first, it gives us a place to put our sponsor(s) logo(s); second, it gives us a shield to prevent other robots from damaging our robot's insides; third, now we can put Sonic on Sonic. As a side effect, we also now have a place to put the brain and battery where there easily accessible; I took the liberty of drawing that up in SolidWorks too.
In the interest of speed and efficiency, we decided to create a separate holder for the autonomous ring. This holder allows three things to be accomplished: simpler coding, placement of the ring, and ideal positioning. The slight advantage this gives may not seem like much, but it adds up.
The old end effector design, while good, was not as efficient as we wanted – it worked beautifully, but being the perfectionists that we are, we wanted to do even better. We decided to slightly alter the shape of the end effector, which should allow it to secure the rings even better. It is still a prototype, but the results so far have been promising.
Today, we finally got the shipment of IR Sensors that we'd been waiting for, and the team is rightfully excited. Unfortunately, the only thing standing in the way of Casey and his new toy was the mandatory prototyping we do before sticking it on. So in lieu of being hounded to death by the general populace, I quickly drew us a simple mount for the sensor. It's not pretty, but it gets Casey off my case and onto the computer, so I call that a win!
