It was almost Complete

I have been working as promised. This is the fruit of my efforts. It has all the parts of a regular chassis except the screws. For some reason, the spreadsheets that I used for the screws kept adding extra pieces and extrusions on to the model. Besides that, everything seen here is in proper working order. Unfortunately it is not complete. My computer froze when I was almost done and then shut down Autodesk Inventor Fusion. After that, Autodesk refused to touch my file with a ten foot pole. It couldn't be read and the progress I had made was deleted.

I finally got AutoCAD to open it, but my computer’s speed was far too slow to handle it. Josh let me use his computer but I was once again lost on how to use the program. I had developed skills in Fusion and AutoCAD was for more advanced. I couldn’t even find the list of components of my piece. I am not sure if it was because the file was modified when Fusion crashed or if I am just that inefficient with AutoCAD. Nevertheless, I finished 90% of my project. The parts that remain have been built. They just need to be placed onto the main chassis. This is where my issues lie. I don’t know how to assemble anything in AutoCAD. I will be working on this over break.

This internship has been a wonderful experience. I did not get to code or program but I did get a new program to play with. I also got to do what I love to do on my free time most, sit around and play with design software all day. If I am chosen to come back in the spring I will see you all then. If not, have a great break. I hope we all performed well on our finals.

Robotics

Last week's robotics cub was far more successful than the first. We are supposed to be competing in the VEX Sack Attack Challenge in March so we must come up with a design for a robot. The purpose of the sack attack challenge is to have your team’s robot pick up sacks and place them in goals. There are two trough goals that are 18 inches high and one goal that is 30 inches high. To place sacks on this goals, they must be stacked on triangle of approximately the size of an adult hand. So, a team’s robot has to be able to stack and/or dump sacks very well. Josh told me not to disclose any information about our robot on the net so I cannot state any specific details. However, we did go with my design for a robot which makes me super excited.

In addition to robotics club I finally got started with auto cad. I installed it on one of the laptops that were provided to me. It, however, couldn’t be installed. Some part of the computer was not sufficient or a file was misplaced. I never figured out the problem. Fortunately, Josh and someone else did though this took up 2 day. So, I was set back. After Auto cad was finally installed, It wouldn’t open any of my files that I downloaded from the vex robot site. I had specific sheets for each component for a vex robot and Auto Cad could not read them or detect them at all. I had finally gotten it set up and it decided to konk out on me. I tried re-downloading the files but all was in vain. Josh looked at this and also couldn’t find the problem. He did notice, however, that there was another program called Autodesk Inventor installed on the computer. This program was able to read all of my files. So, my entire internship has been saved by Josh all week.

This week I will be working with Inventor to build a chassis. I will have it done by Friday, should the cosmos work in my favor. I will post soon to let you know how things have been going. It is also final's week so there is a lot to do. I hope you all have been doing well. 

Our Competition Robot

For those of you who don't know. I am now in the robotics club, along with Yany. We have to build a robot that will compete in the vex competition in March. It has to be able to raise bean bags up to a goal and stack them on a small triangle. Here is a picture of a vex robot. They remind me of the types of robots I used to build when I was small.

Anyhow I'm super excited. I'll be back next week with more news.