@kaylawong

yesterday i worked on making the shaft collars and pulleys to print out. our pulley prints were not very successful, but the shaft collars turned out great. i downloaded a free shaft collar file from this link and i changed the size of the screw hole, the width, and i adjusted it so there were two flat ends (so we could use a screw and nut). my team also cut the shafts so we can start making our intake

today i iterated more on the design of the intake. after printing the pulleys, we realized the belt was slipping and skipping teeth on the pulleys because we were using GT2 belts. we’re now pivoting to HTD-5M belts so we can hopefully not have any slipping happen on our intake. we also ordered more parts and added them to our purchase list!! when the sheet metal comes, we will be able to test the fit of bearings and other parts as well.

here’s an update on what the robot has been doing! i haven’t been working much on the driving part, so my teammates did a majority of figuring out how to navigate the course and how to drive. our robot was able to make it over the hill (but it flipped over if you watch the video lol). i am still working on the intake, but i have gotten further by printing out some pulleys and some shaft to bearing attachments we might use on the robot. tomorrow we will hopefully order sheet metal to hold our intake system. also, one of our prints turned into a blob

some of our parts for the intake arrived, so i was able to design more parts of our intake around it. i adjusted the rollers and came up with two different iterations, depending on the width of the rubber we will use to wrap around the rollers. i also measured the diameter of the hex shafts that arrived, which let me test printing out GT2 gears. i edited the gear by finding a part on McMaster-Carr and cutting out the hex shape and chopping off the extruded portion.

I added an animation at the bottom of the page which will lead to other pages to my website. It took me awhile to figure out how to hide the polaroids behind the head, and then animate them to pop out. Eventually, I learned to use inline-block instead of a flexbox to allow me to move around the divs behind the head. I drew all of these assets in Procreate, including the pattern in the background (which I updated to a dotted comic pattern) and the Spider-Girl that I made blue (since it’s my favorite color). I also added some hover effects and updated the cursor so that the cursor turned into a red spider when something is clickable. The polaroids go from grayscale to color when you hover over them as well.

I added more to the landing page of my website, to go along with the script from Spider-Man into the Spiderverse. I added some hover animations as well, for the images that are displayed. It was challenging to figure out the spacing and using flexboxes, but it’s starting to come together! I will add the other pages for my next devlog hopefully.

I started making my Spider-Man themed portfolio!! I sketched out a design on Procreate and designed the top part of the website. I used a comic font from the internet to make the intro text and I animated the name tag in the center of the page. I will next add the bottom of the website where people can click on different pages about me.

i worked on our shooter design, coming up with different ways to get the tennis balls into a bucket while fitting into our size constraints. especially with having a pivot on our intake, having the motors for the flywheels in the back would add too much weight, so i am still figuring out how to get that to work. i am testing out different orientations for the motors and flywheel, such as a dual horizontal flywheel shooter and a single flywheel shooter.

today, i worked on editing our parts that will be machined for our intake. instead of making it three pieces, we realized we could just bend one large piece of metal. for the motor mount, i added a way to allow it to tension so that when we add belts, we can adjust accordingly. i also ordered all the parts we need for the intake system, including the shafts, motor, bearings, etc. lastly, we also started planning out how our shooter would work, which we chose to do two flywheels at the end of the conveyor.

i mostly researched different parts to purchase and further refined how the intake would work. to run the conveyor, one motor would power the first roller, then the rest would be connected by pulleys and belts. i also added a motor mount to the side plate of the intake. for the chassis itself, i extended the base plate and L-brackets so that it would be 15x15 inches, which was one of the constraints.

yesterday i worked on combining our intake system with a pivot. i realized that there was very little space between both motors, so i moved the pivot between where two motors are, where a shaft would be placed under the intake. however, in order to fit under the 8 inch limit, the pvc pipes would have to be smaller or the walls of the intake would have to be shorter. i also started putting other components into the CAD, including the bearings, pipes, and pulleys that might be on the robot. lastly, i tried to modify the bottom pan of the robot’s frame to allow for the intake to turn downwards at a more drastic angle.

today, my teammates and i first worked on getting the 3d printed center parts of our wheels to fit. the pneumatic wheels were really difficult to work with, especially because the prints weren’t fitting on perfectly (it took us like 1-2 hours). while the others worked on driving with the new wheels and drafting the climbing mechanism, i worked on designing our intake and shooter. i made a 3d model and a geometry sketch to figure out how the pivot would work and how our motors would be mounted. i eventually landed on this design that i will edit more tomorrow.

I started working on Hackpad and I followed the tutorial to create my PCB and CAD design for the container. I plan to make it Tamagotchi themed with four keys, the OLED display, and a rotary encoder. I used Onshape instead of Fusion to make the container.

i continued to work on the intake system, which we plan to do a roller and conveyor system to hold/intake the tennis balls. i found several components online and compiled them into a spreadsheet to check the costs. i ran into some issues, especially with figuring out how to pivot the entire conveyor while being able to secure the two plates so they move together.

earlier in the day, we switched out our ESCs so now our wheels can turn in both directions. we also tried flipping over the robot to see if that would allow for a greater chassis to wheel clearance. later, we brainstormed the next steps for our robot, especially the intake and shooter as well as the climb mechanism. i spent a lot of time creating geometry sketches for different ways we can shoot the tennis balls to fit within the size constraints. we ended up choosing to do a conveyor-like system and either magnets or a cascading system for climb.

we assembled all of our aluminum parts using rivets and tested our drive program. our wheels started to fall off because the 3d prints started to get looser on the motors, but we were able to successfully drive. although we only used our unidirectional ESCs, we were able to drive around by only going forward. the bearing pivot had issues as well, especially because when it rammed into cinderblocks it would get bent… but we were able to print containers for our electrical components (batteries, raspberry pi, arducam etc.). i was able to test my vision program to slalom around the cones, and it wasn’t exactly perfect but it was able to respond to obstacles.

after we 3d printed more wheels and glued rubber to the pla, we got to assemble our first iteration of our robot!! we used a cardboard box temporarily, but it was very flimsy so the motors/wheels weren’t very secure. right now, we are using unidirectional ESCs so we will hopefully get bidirectional ones so our robot can go backwards. i used ai to work on a vision program so that the robot would slalom around the red cones using the raspberry pi and arducam. also, our aluminum parts finally came in so tomorrow we will get to put together more parts

as a team we worked on figuring out the cad for our robot. i worked on making the l-brackets using onshape. we took inspiration from the hammerhead gobilda robot that had the front two wheels on an axle which would help us when navigating the obstacles on the course. i learned how to use new features on onshape, like the sheet metal model and the flange to make bends on the model.

we started brainstorming ideas for how our autonomous robot would look like and function. since our first goal is to just have a robot that can drive, we sketched out a drivebase and chassis. we also researched different materials, like motors, that we may need for the project. earlier, i used ai to develop a vision system on my computer to detect tennis balls.