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.