Week 1

We had just come back from the Houston Kickoff event at NASA Space Center Houston and were floored by the new game this year, Lunacy. We had to start on designing our robot right away, so the next day, we had a strategy meeting.

Strategy Meeting - January 4, 2009

A member of our team graciously hosted the whole robotics team at her house to work on designing the robot, which would soon become to be known as Disco Ballulator. The team members brought their independently designed robot ideas to the meeting in hopes that the team could use some of the designs. We had group discussions about what we wanted the robot to do, what kind of scoring method it would use, and if it we wanted it to be floor loading. We decided on a tank drive, wide, back loading, non-turreted shooting robot.

In addition to talking about strategy, all of the members of the robotics team brought a tool that we could use during the build season. This was to ensure that the mentors didn't have to provide all of the tools like they did in the 2008 season. The strategy meeting was a great success, and the DiscoBots will make sure to have a strategy meeting for years to come.

Building the Robot - January 5, 7, 9, and 10, 2009

We did not waste anytime implementing our plans. Because we still had to work out the logistics of our back loading part of our robot design, we decided to get the drivetrain, electronics, a basic program, and the trailer built. So, we split off into sub teams. The build team used the chasy from the kit of parts to make the drivetrain for the robot. Once they had finalized the skeleton of the drivetrain, a mentor took the chasy home to cut the pieces to size, and paint the drivetrain a powder blue. The electronics team made the connectors to connect the power distribution board to the jaguars, and the jaguars to a motor's connector. In addition to that, they made sure that the electronics were secure on the temporary electronics board. The programming team made a basic program that could control the wheels. The trailer was built from instructions found on the internet. Because we didn't have any extra slick wheels at the time, they did not make the top plate for the trailer in hopes that they would be able to change out the wheels at a later time. By the end of the week we had a powder blue drivetrain, working electronic board, and a trailer that could be pulled around. We were even able to take video of our progress. This was a great improvement from last year, where we had finished our drivetrain around week three.

Although we had done a lot of physical work, we had to put our heads together to figure out how to collect the Orbit Balls. There were a lot of options, and we considered all of them. One was to use surgical tubing that would run the length of the collector, and be one continuous force that would push the orbit balls up the robot. Another was a conveyor belt, which would be like the surgical tubing, but would extend the whole length of the width of the collector. Though, the one we decided on was individual rollers, which would allow for control of two different levels of rollers just in case the drive team wanted to keep some orbit balls, down or didn't want to waste power on running the bottom motors. We made a prototype of the collector just to make sure it was going to work, and we got promising results.

Return to the 2009 build page - Go to week 2