Week of December 14th

We finally finished our mechanum drivetrain, and we're close to done with rebuilding the robot in CAD! Here's a quick changelog of what's new with the robot this week:

• Fixed the orientation of the mechanum wheels.

  • From a top-down view, the rollers on the wheels are supposed to make an 'X' to allow the robot to move omnidirectionally (meaning it moves forward, backwards, turns and strafes), but the wheels were originally installed upside-down.

• Relocated the front motors

  • Fixes an issue where the motor and wheel gears were a few millimeters away from each other so they wouldn't mesh with each other and drive the wheel correctly. Once the motor was repositioned, the gear was able to properly drive the wheel. To make sure everything was balanced, I also moved the adjacent motor.

• Designed and laser-cut a wooden panel to mount the control hub and battery.

  • Now everything is a lot neater, and we should theoretically avoid ESD issues since the electronics are mounted on a wooden panel. We'll still be adding a grounding wire, just to be safe.

• Finally managed to test everything, and it moves!

  • It only spins in a circle, but hey, it's a start!

This is our last update before 2021, but over the break we hope to have our expansion hub mounted, and have written software to drive the bot so when we come back in January, we can focus primarily on our auto opmode, intake and shooter assemblies.

Happy holidays everyone!