Tuesday, November 12, 2013

18.5 Inches...On NO!

One of the rules for the robot is that it must be no bigger than 18 inches x 18 inches x 18 inches. Before the competition, it will be inspected by the judges and must fit into a sizing cube. We thought we had it under control . . . and then we measured it one more time. Oops!

The way we designed our conveyor meant it extended beyond the back brackets by about 1/2 inch. Which made our robot too big! Which meant we had to disassemble a significant part of it to move some of the pieces to decrease the size.

The other problem we discovered is that the side-to-side measurement was about 18.25 inches. That may not seem like much, but that 0.25 inch would keep us out of the competition. The problem here was the the the screws on the omni-wheels. The only solution we could find was to replace the omni-wheels with regular wheels, so that's what we did.

We had a couple of hours of panic going on, but now we're all set. The robot will fit inside the 18 inch cube, so that's one part of the robot inspection we will pass!