Today we made significant progress by printing our base in MDF, attaching our motors, and finally getting it to move with our test harness code!

Getting to this point was not easy. When we laser cut our MDF parts, we found the laser cutter did not completely cut the base and hardly cut the tab slotted floor dividers. We were able to cut the base with a knife to take it out but we had to reprint the dividers. We were told the problem had to do with the uneveness of the board and the calibration of the laser printer. If the laser printer cuts far away from where the calibration happens, the laser may not cut through the material. We also quickly figured out due to precise cuts, it is much better to bond parts with hot glue by applying glue on the edges like a joint instead of sandwhiching glue between components.

Our main problem with mounting the motors are to allow a sensor base to exist as well as securing the motor. We made a box assembly with tab slots and a round surface for the motor to rest on. However the motor is flush with a narrow surface, causing it to be slanted which required us to glue a small block to align it straight. We should have tested the pipe mount before drilling holes, but we decided the hole placement we determined from the foamcore was perfect, and so drilled the holes first. We soon had a hard time screwing in one of the pipe mounts before forcing a screw to be slanted to fit it the pipe mount.

We made a simple test to run the motors forwards and backwards on the robot and found the motors do not run very fast, the speed is similar to that of the roach droids despite the minimial payload. The robot doesn't move straight likely because the wheel mounts aren't glued to the motor shaft, we will do that when we are comfortable with our base. We have (in the last few days, sorry for not posting them earlier) also put most of our sensors on perboards, and am working to integrating them onto the robot.

Our tasks now are to finish what we need for checkoff (videos of our test harness, sensor placement, building more of the base), working on the HSM, debugging the tape sensors, integrating our beacon detector, and thinking about integrating a servo for the ball launcher.