McKinley Robotics

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Mr. Leong shows Helen how the fly-cutter works

Fu Quan and Frankie continue their work on the pneumatics

There's been a breach in our security measures

The mechanical mentors discuss how to mount the motors together

So begins another evening for McKinley Robotics

Ryan continues to work on the mill under Wilson's supervision

Mr. Ing cuts a piece off from our stock aluminum plate

Kris watches the winning Autodesk animation from last season

Michelle and Kris watch the training videos for Autodesk 3ds Max

Helen taps the mounting plate for the motors

Frankie demonstrates to Ms. Owens how the grabber will function

It's time for the arranged marriage of the chassis and the manipulator

Mr. Leong watches the digital readout to ensure precise results

Sam continues to upset people on the team

A gremlin has invaded our card design which will be attached to the leis for Portland

Felix prepares for the next Mimi Grand Prix

Mr. Ing shows Ryan how to part gears from the gear stock we have

The lei cards don't come apart as easily as they're supposed to

The rubber band attachment assembly line

Testing the unfolding of the manipulator

The control board is ready for electrical installation

Ryan seems excited about the omni-wheels that we may have to use

      The mechanical team's goal for this week was to complete the lift. Thinking of the work our lift would undertake, we decided on using a similar design to our 2005 robot.       We began the week with recreating and modifying the transmission motor mounts for the lift. We also completed coupling the Fisher Price motors together, in result it looked like afterburners on a space shuttle. In addition to the motor coupling, we made gears to equalize the gear ratio because of a slight discrepancy between rpm.
       We created caps for the chain blocks and chain block sliders to hold the chain in place, this was a fun and fast process. Tragedy strikes; we broke an end-mill when making lift bearing blocks and may it rest in peace.
       And here is this week's status report: Helen would like to point out that she was not missing last week, just sleeping in. Wilson realized how nothing makes any sense once you turn 18. Wendy enjoyed eating some cherry flavored pepto bismol, but made a funny face after. Li Xi competed in the Japan Bowl and won third place. John screamed and rejoiced at our new controller board after it went through some modifications, but sadly didn't last. Ryan celebrated Chinese New Years and got jai at Wendy's!

       This week we did something special. The programming team organized itself and made a checklist of tasks to complete.
       The first item on our list was to write a program for manual and automatic gear shifting. We also made a wheel variable speed program for the joystick drive and we integrated a steering wheel program, which was fixed at the beginning of the week. The process of writing the steering wheel program was a horrendous ordeal comprising of many trials and erroneous attempts to program correctly.
       The team also pinned out the functions on the steering wheel, and we are planning to utilize the information to improve driving. To check the ball-grabber, we are planning to write a program for the IR beam sensor. In matters of hardware, we wired two extra relays and manually tested the pneumatics system.

       During the extremely busy week 5, we have continued to use our cameras and video cams to document the many events that have occured this week. The pictures and videos we took is for the website and preservations of this year's efforts.
       We made even more progress on the website. We put up 2 more videos on Google video. (We couldn't find server space, but we were able to use Google video to upload our videos). We also finished the Community Outreach and the Mentors pages this week.
       We are currently gathering testimonials and the page should be done by next week.

This week we mostly practiced our skills using Autodesk. We then began designing business cards in Photoshop. Then after printing the business cards we began separating all the business cards and cutting them up. We punched holes in them to attach rubber bands to them.
We also started to learn how to use the 3d max program by watching videos. On the program we managed to animate 3d objects. Lastly, we went to dafonts.com to find a font for this year’s display board.