Almost Done!!!

Well we're almost done! In the past week we finished manufacturing the majority of the components. We turned down all the shafts, after several attempts, due to the imprecision of the lathe machinery and the tight tolerances that we required on all of our shafts. We made two different types of brackets, brackets to hold the shafts and a few to hold the walls. We assembled all of the motors and began to attach them to the cart base. It was quickly figured out that we had to make a new place block for the motor that would drive the up and down motion of the arm so that it wouldn't interfere with the motion of the railing. The delrin plate was cut and filed to a point so that it would fit behind the balls in the arena. It was quickly found out that we needed to mill the plates to allow for the threaded rod to pass above the wedge. Some of our teammates figured out that you can take the vice off the milling machine and attach blocks and holding pins directly to the milling table. We used this technique in order to create the cutouts for the front wall and the side walls.

As you can see in this picture, we have most of the machine assembled. We must check our alignments within the arena and make sure that our wiring is secure and set up so that we can easily hook it up to the battery and control packs the day of the contest.







As you see below, we are thinking about how we could do some last minute defensive moves. There are a few materials that we haven't used yet in our kit, one of them is the mesh sheet. We were thinking of attaching it to the top of the cart to allow any rouge flying balls to slide back down our cart and back into their side of the slot. The only reason that we are not making this a top priority is so far we have not noticed any groups making a primary shooting device. Hopefully we get done in time and it works :)