I Hope This is Not How it is Done in the Industry

17 Apr 2021- Gabriel Roper

The title of this week’s update is a quote from Trevor. The cause of the quote is because with one week left before the test document is due, we have disassembled a decent portion of the robot. This was necessary as the robot was too heavy for the servos to handle. As a result, we are replaceing the rest of the metal joints of the robot with carbon-fiber infused 3D prints. This decreases the weight of the robot significantly, and should allow the robot to walk.

Why the motors are being overstressed is unclear, as the robot’s mass matched our calculations. We are not currently looking too far into this, as finishing the robot is our main goal.

In other news, the university PCB mill is broken, so we had to jerry-rig our existing PCB to support the new regulator. Surprisingly, this worked.

While these are unfortunate setbacks, the testing we have performed so far suggests that our robot is actually working, it was just too heavy. Because of this, we are still confident that we can get the robot walking by the end of next week.