Capping

First Design

This was our first design it has 14 sides and 6 holes to grab on easier. This design was light weight but it can fall over easily and sometimes we were incapable of picking it up for this reason.

Second Design

This design was our first sensible design. It has 3 loops to make grabbing it easy and was light weight so capping was a breeze. It started to go wrong when the cap would be susceptible to falling over like the first design.

Third Design

This design worked well because we were using drawer slides and they would pick it up by its zip ties. It faulted by falling off most of the times and it was breaking a lot.

Final Design

This is our current and final design. When we switched to using the tape measure to cap we needed something super light. The cup works perfectly.

Shipping Element Timeline

  • During our initial design review, we decided that we would model our shipping element after a Solo cup because it is light, tapered so it will fit easily on the shipping hub and would be easy to 3d print.

  • After our first tournament we modified our shipping element to have 3 big “mickey mouse ear” loops to improve the grabbing time.

  • Before our state tournament we decided to go towards a box design because it meant we had to be less accurate.

  • After our state tournament we saw an awesome capping mechanism that used a tape measure. For our improved robot we decided to try to duplicate that but needed the lightest capping element possible so we use an actual cup now.

Grabber Timeline

  • We started using a pincher that looked quite bad and it was also way heavier than other designs.

  • While volunteering at a FLL tournament we found an FLL team that had a slick pincher design that worked with 2 ranges of motion. We asked them if we could use their design as a basis to redesign ours, and they agreed so we built and used that.

  • At the state tournament we saw a team using a tape measure and magnet to grab the team shipping element. This design is really complicated but we were able to find some examples of similar devices on the internet. But they were way too big to fit on our robot.

  • We eventually made our own tape measure that fit on our robot and it can extend to over 20 feet! (6 meters)

Struggles and Solutions

  • The pincher design wasn’t successful because it needed to be lined up perfectly to the shipping element. It also took way too long to cap.

  • With our tape measure having problems, we broke the design down into separate functions: Extend, rotate, tilt and figured out how to eliminate some components and make it fit.


Page written By Logan