McKinley Robotics - Week 5 Gallery

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James and Calvin practicing on the '05 machine

Mr. Dengler from Punahou, Mr. Lee from Waialua, and Mr. Tui from McKinley

Well...Calvin and Katie got keeped, Jinny is hiding and James is magicing

Mr. Ing discussing the final arm design with the team

Electronics and Mechanics come together to make the robot...

Felix testing out the new prototype, cardboard mount for the steering wheel

The electrical team gathered to examine the blueprints

Mr. Lau and Calvin using the tablesaw to cut the spiderfoot

Daniel and Mr. Ono know how to avoid the camera

Mr. Ing and Mr. Leong working on the mill

Mr. Ono and Mr. Leong watch as Mr. Ing makes adjustments to the robot arm

Mr. Lau explaining to the testing team how to insert the eyescrews into the wood

Programming team working on the code for the robot arm

Calvin, Jinny, Iat, and James at KITV 4 News Station

Mr. Tui, Iat, Jinny, Mr. Ing, Calvin, and James waiting for their cues

Ben Gutierrez from KITV 4 Island Weather checking out the control box

Ms. Owens, Katie, and Jonathan at the site of Hawaii Public Radio

The team doing some last minute brainstorming

It seems a certain mentor is camera shy...

Measuring the distance from the floor to the plate

"Girlie, what did I tell you about dismembering people?!?"

Working collaborately to attach the support structure

The electrical, testing, and mechanical teams working hard

The testing team pushing the rack to the back of the room

      During the beginning of the week, we decided to change the design of the grabber. When our new tubes came in, we tested the keepers on the prototype grabber to see how well it worked. To our dismay, when the tubes are "mushy," our grabber cannot manipulate them as well as we had hoped. Now, we have another grabber with the same concept but with a different manipulator.
      After deciding on the grabber design, the mentors cut up a hollow aluminum cylindrical tube for the arm. Mr. Leong used a fly cutter to make room to attach a smaller hollow aluminum cylindrical tube. The smaller tube is used to hold bearings. To attach the two together, Mr. Ing had to weld them.
      On a side note, after much labor in front of a laptop, Adrian has completed the chassis for our robot on Autodesk Inventor. While the mentors were welding the arm, we helped the testing team set up the goal so they can experiment with the motion of the rack.

      This was a very prosperous week for the electrical/programming team in that we finally established accuracy in our autonomous program. After trials of experimental analysis, we discovered that we could drive backward and forward well during autonomous mode.
      However, we weren't always successful. We found out after some testing that during our tele-operated mode, the robot could not drive straight. This was due to the fact that the left wheel were spinning faster than the right wheel. We addressed this problem by incorporating an "auto adjust" function into the program. This gladly solved the problem. Originally, we tried to find the change in ticks for a given program cycle. However, the change in ticks were so small that it only gave us the number one or zero. So we decided to determine the total ticks accumulated. We thus wrote a code to reset when turning in our program.
      We also focused a lot on commenting the rest of our code this week. We did this for the purpose of making the program more understandable. Additionally, we concentrated on finding values to turn 90 degrees. We found the number of ticks on the encoder that the robot took to turn 90 degrees. We only have one week left and we hope luck will dawn on us in this finality as we program away.

       There are a lot of new sections of the website we want to release, but we feel now is not the time. We will wait until crunch time to release them. In the meantime, the site is going to stay the way it is with updates to the galleries.
       We also started on our yearbook page that will appear in the 2007 McKinley High School Black and Gold yearbook. Again, it is a bit of a challenge to design a layout for 15 students and about 10 mentors.
       TKM is making more public appearances. This week, robotics team members appeared on the KITV4 morning news and the Hawaii Public Radio's Town Square. With progress being made on the Governor's Innovation in Education initiative, the PR team will have lots to do after the build season ends.

TKM on the Hawaii Public Radio - Click here to listen
featuring Ms. Owens, Katie, and Jonathan

       We started this week off by continuing our contruction of the rack. Our first task was to attach the eye bolts to the rack. This was a difficult task because we had to climb up the ladder to drill holes on the top of the rack. Since we only had one big piece of lumber, we had to cut it into smaller and more portable pieces.
       We then proceeded to cut the center plates as well as the "spider's foot". Our mentor showed us how to cut a circle using the bandsaw. He also taught us how to use an uni-bit to drill holes into our PVC piping. This special bit has measurements on how big or small we would want to cut our holes.
       We then went on make incisions into our PVC so that it could attach to our center plates. We then completed our "spider's foot" by attaching our "stingers" on to it. Our next task to was to figure the length of our chains and how to attach it.
       During this week we also practiced with our 2005 robot to get a better feel of how it would be like when we finally finish our 2007 robot. We also refined our strategies with the help of our fellow members and mentors. Our goal next week is to create an operator control box and a new crate for the 2007 FIRST Robotics Competition.