We (the PhyXTGears) do not work on Fridays. I don’t think it’s for any specific reason, other than to give us a chance to rest and do something else for a day. Since we won’t be meeting today I thought this would be a good opportunity to give a quick re-cap of what has been going on around Morrison Mock this week.
We have been working on three ideas for getting the basketball into the hoop. 1) Using three wheels to shoot the ball, kind of like a pitching machine. 2) A low power wheel or a roller that will dunk the ball right into the hoop. 3) A catapult type launcher. So far we also have two prototypes for gathering the basketballs. 1) Six vertical rollers that have small rubber noodle things going through them. These rollers will spin to bring the ball into the robot. 2) A long PVC bar with surgical tubing attached in a spiral to grab the ball and bring it into the middle.
Once we have the ball in the robot we haven’t figured out exactly how we are going to get the ball up and out to get into the launcher. So that’s where we are so far. We’ll see what happens tomorrow as we start week three of our build season.
Jessica Bennett