Vex Turning Point Final Robot
This year vex came out with the new game called “Turning Point” its played on a 12ft by 12ft feild with two allianced robots, the object of the game is to score points by scoring flags or caps either on the ground or on the scoring posts. At the begining of the year we decided to score by using a flywheel to hit flags. Here is a photo of out hawaii flywheel bot.
For our first robot we went for a flywheel design with a cap flipper, this was our first time building a flywheel, we looked up some old videos from the game “Nothing But Net” for flywheel designs. Our atempt at a flywheel was nothing close to what we had in mind and dididnt work nearly as well as we wanted but we worked with it and after alot of greese and some help from Hisham and Mr.Ma we got it working for the Hawaii competition. Our cap fliper worked very well and was consistant for scoring caps. We ended up placing 2nd in the Vex Saint Louis Invetational tournement.
For our second competition we decided to rebuild our flywheel with a more efficient gear train, and an intake built so we can climb the platform. We used a 1-25 gear ratio for our flywheel. We also desided to build an arm to score caps on the low and high posts. We ran into issues with overheating because we didint build a ratchet dessign into our flywheel. The claw was hard to score with because of how small it is and the arm also overheated due to the old 393 motors.
Here are some more picture of out 2nd robot design, we maxed out on motors and used a power expander so we have a dual battery setup using the old 393 motors.
For out V.3 robot we added a ratchet to our flywheel and changed our claw dessign to a larger platform so its easier to pick up the caps, we improved our elastics design to try to prevent our over heating problems.
Here are some picture of our ratched design.
For our 3rd dessign we decided to build a smaller base for our robot because the previous robot had issues parking on the platfor due to the width. We also tried the same arm dessign on our 3rd version, we built a smaller double reverse four-bar, and had it of to one side of the robot instead of around the robot, we had to do this to fit our new ball launcher. We decided to swap out the flywheel wich is a more comon design and try something a little different. Our first attempt at a catapolt on the one side of the robot was not very successful. The reasons for this are one, we weren’t quite sure how to build it since it was our first time and ran into problems with gearing and elastic placement, and two, we still didn’t have the new V.5 kit wich lead to the need for more 393 motors on the catapult.
This is our current robot dessign. For our ball launcher we decided to keep the catapult and rebuild it with the V.5 motors, we also designed the launcher to shoot two balls at once. We have a 18-1 gear ratio to power our catapult, we use 8-7 elastics. We have isues with stopping our catapult from bending because of the amount of force it creates when shooting the balls, We have a bunch of standoffs and c chanels supporting our catapult currency and is helping a bit with the bending.
For our arm we decided to build a reverse stacking arm, wich picks up the caps on the other teams alianced colour with a passive intake and stacks them on the post using 2 V.5 motors.
Here is a photo of our allignment bar wich helps the driver line up with the pole when stacking caps.
here are some photos from the first week of building our robot.
Here are some more photos of our completes robot for 2019 “Turning Point”
BCIT Competition 2019
By the end of the year we had our robot perfected for the BCIT competition, and placed 1st in the B devision wile allianced with another burnsview team 98549X. Our team also took home the Build award and Amaze award. It was a great ending to our 2019 season and we look forward to next year.
Plans For Next Year
Next year we are planning to go to as many competitions as possible because its my teams last year and an increased budget would be a great help for our club since it is difficult for us to find sponsors and we are very grateful for the ones we have supporting our club.