CADtastic deployment

We finally got our deployment figured out.  It is excessively late to be doing designs and redesigns, but it’s iterative, right?  We’d rather catch our mistakes in sketches than in parts, anyway.  We’ll have a three-stage deployment process.  One arm comes down and engages the tower post; at :10 another arm comes down holding the minibot and pushes it onto the post with a small pneumatic cylinder.  Three 3/4″ bore, 2″ stroke cylinders are all we’ll have on the robot so we won’t need a compressor.  Tomorrow we’ll give a final look, convert the files, and send them to our fabricator.

The lion’s share of our parts are supposed to come in tomorrow, so it should be a very busy and exciting day.  We’ll finally get the floor loader on, get the lift powered, and maybe even do a bit of testing.

Wait, how can we do testing with a toasted cRIO?  Well, our friends at FRC234 were gracious enough to allow us to borrow their 2009 cRIO until our new one gets shipped.  Partly because Indiana teams look out for each other, and partly because Cyber Blue is just cool like that.

We’ve also been doing some work on creating gussets to shore up our lift.  When we’re done it will be very robust, and will provide a bit of protection to other features.