On the morn of Saturday January the 31st, the LigerBots organized a morning breakfast celebration, at the Whole Foods located in Four Corners, from 9 to 11 AM. Thank you for enjoying pancakes, bagels and other breakfast foods, and supporting LigerBots. We raised over $500.

Mechanical:

For the first part of the week we could not physically work on our robot because the parts we needed were ordered, and did not arrive until Thursday the 22nd, so we sent most of out week troubleshooting prototypes, finalizing our designs, and CADing our ideas. We finalized our design for our tote lifting mechanism, and incorporated it into our CAD designs. As of Thursday all parts for the chassis have arrived, and we anticipate we will have a driving, full size robot base by the end of Monday the 25th. The parts for our lifter mechanisms are en route and scheduled to arrive by 1/28. We began finalizing designs of a kicker mechanism to push out the totes from our robot. After going through many designs, we concluded that the best design is one that pushes a stack out of the robot by pushing in the middle of the fourth tote in the stack, with a stabilizer at the top for the can, so that it doesn’t fall off in the processes. This was designed to functions best when our robot is angled on the scoring platform, as that is when the stack would experience the least motion being pushed out, and as it would allow our robot to align itself consistently. We are in the process of putting a design into the CAD.

Outreach:

This week was a busy week for the team in terms of outreach, we participated in two events as well as continuing our month long fundraiser. This week, we presented on STEM, and FIRST, as well as demoing our 2014 robot at Franklin elementary school, and at Newton North’s High School’s Just Think Expo. Both events were successful, between them we presented to lots people, and were able to spread the ideas and importance of STEM to all age groups from second grader to senior citizen. In addition every day for the entire month of January the team has been staffing a table at our sponsor, Whole Foods Market at four corners, at which we are presenting about the team, and about STEM, and asking customers to buy special coupons at checkout, the money from which goes towards supporting LigerBots.

Electrical and Programming:

This week the electrical group integrated more motor controllers, solenoids, and pneumatics, onto our test chassis, as well as cleaning up wire routing, and adding better wire connectors. In addition electrical began to CAD the final positions of the electronic components on our final robot. Programming was able to flash the RoboRIO with the new C++ code, and were able to get both test chassis to drive, fore pistons, and get sensor inputs.

Field Elements:

On Monday the 19th the step, the last of our field elements was completed. Now that we have a complete set of field elements the field element group has disbanded and joined other groups.

We Are Now In C++ !!!

As we were preparing to configure the RoboRio, we noticed that the java run-time environment (JRE) takes up about half of the available memory in the RoboRIO, which significantly lowers the space available for coding. This Year in addition to the standard drive and control code, we will be working with vision processing, and various other sensory inputs, all of which will take up space on the RoboRIO, so the more space we have the better. In addition, the the Open Computer Vision Library (OpenCV Library), which we will be using to build our vision code, is native in C++, so we will not have to convert.

Mechanical & CAD:

On Sunday January 4th, the day after the after kickoff, the whole team got together to decide on game strategy, and decided that this year we would try to go for making the highest stacks of totes we could, and would intake primarily from the feeder stations, but would build in the ability to pick up of the ground. The next day on Monday the 4th the entire team deliberated again over chassis shape, and general solutions to the challenge, and concluded that we would be using a C-shaped chassis, and creating a mechanism to build a stack of totes by picking up a recycling bin game piece, lift it the height of a tote, place a tote below it, and continue until we had a stack of six. This way we could build an entire stack inside our robot which we could support internally limiting our risk of losing a stack. Over the next couple of days the mechanical group sat down and discussed possible solutions as well as drafting ideas for mechanisms. They then proceed to start building prototypes. All prototypes of designs are being ‘CADded’ in real time by our CAD group. Images and descriptions of said prototypes will be posted on Monday.

Business and Outreach:

Even though we are in the height of build season LigerBots’ presence in the community is as evident as ever! This month we are having a fundraiser in partnership with our sponsor Whole Foods, in which Whole Foods will provide the option to shoppers to donate money to the team. We will have a table set up at Whole Foods, manned by team members every day for the entire month. We will also be attending some of our local elementary schools to spread FIRST and STEM to the students of those schools. But, that is not all on Sunday February 8th we will be running the Providence Bruins half time show at which we will, demonstrate our 2014 robot, give out team tee-shirts, and talk about STEM and FIRST.

Electrical, Programming, and Kit-bot:

On Saturday January 10th the Electrical & Pneumatic group join forces with the Kit-bot group to create a system for the Electronics group to test code on, below is a picture of our test chassis, complete with the new roboRIO, talons, and pneumatic systems, and four cim drive train! This chassis will be continually updated so that its hardware matches that that will eventually be on our final robot.

Field Elements Group:

As of Friday our Field Elements group finished our feeder station, and we are now ready test prototypes for intake of noodles and totes.

Below are the groups that our team has subdivided into, with a brief description for each.

Kitbot: Is a team composed mostly of first year members who are assembling the kit of parts chassis (the kit-bot) so that they can gain mechanical knowledge, and so that the programming and electrical groups can have practice mounting electronics and running code on the new system.

Mechanical: Our group of core engineers who strive day and night to design and construct our futurely absolutely amazing robot. They are designing and prototyping and will later split into separate groups to work on individual components.

CAD (Computer Aided Design): This group creates digital renderings of our designs and prototypes using PTC’s software CREO.

Programming: They write the code which runs our robot.

Electrical/Pneumatic: They design and construct the electrical and pneumatic systems that will run our robot.

Outreach: This group works on organizing STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) outreach events, and fundraising and money management. They also submit all of the awards.

Field Elements: This group constructs the field elements with which our robot can interact.