Let the Race Begin: Day 15

Hey what is up? I don’t know, but let's talk about robotic anyway. Tonight we worked on the mock field. They were testing out the goals to see if the balls will go through. We finely decided to go with a single direction shooter. We also worked on a ball pick up using a screw like system. OK that is all I know about today, have fun looking at the Photos.

Anna Dodd
Media Team

Build Season: Week 3 Day 14

Today has been a very productive day. We had some people visit form the Ball State Academy. They filled in some of the gaps that were left by a few of our team members who don't come on Sundays. 

All of the prototypes are coming along nicely. There are still a lot of things that need to be tweaked. I think now we have a pretty good idea about what we want our robot to look like and what we want it to do. Currently we have a semi-set idea of how the pick up mechanism is going to work. The storage space/ball lifter is coming along nicely. Right now the kicker/launcher/dunking prototype is giving us the most trouble.

Jessica Bennett

Almost Half Way! Week 3: Day 13

Today we finally got our new driver station parts! My subteam worked on gathering the parts, testing them, and setting everything up. We've got most of our network configured and now just need to put all the pieces onto the driver station. Shawn got an excellent start on the driver station structure, so next week we'll likely put everything together.

For the rest of the day, the programming team worked on getting C4 working and preparing for our presentation at the end of the day. C4 (our 2009 robot) has not been used very frequently and, as we found out, had several bad motor controllers. After some debugging and crawling around on the floor, we managed to return C4 to its functional state. We are planning to run C4 with our X360 Kinect.

At the end of the day, all of the subteams showed off their work from this week. Our subteam showed off the linear storage proposition while other groups showed off a mortar-like shooter, a method for picking balls up off the floor, and several ideas for interacting with the balls once inside the robot. With only four weeks left, we'll need to focus and work very hard to meet our deadline. Still, we do have a chassis and a driver station so within the next week we should have a pretty good idea of where we stand.

Andrew Rhine
Programming/Website subteams

Friday: Week Two Recap

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

Week 2: Day 12

Today the mechanical  team continued to develop their prototypes. The mentors and some of the team members discussed different shooting and pick up mechanisms, demonstrating them with one of the prototypes. Michael, Dakotah, and Bryce worked with Nathan to develop a prototype push down arm that would be able to tip the ramp in the game arena. The documentation team was hard at work preparing the movie. Attendance was low tonight.





Maggie Taylor
Programing