Another update of what we did from day to day

On Wednesday I modified the servos. That's about all we did. Chuck was not there. I started rebuilding the grabber, but there wasn't much time left. Oh, and I helped Alec and Rob's team with their servos, for theirs were malfunctioning.

On Thursday Chuck was back! We finished rebuilding the grabber. It looks a bit uglier than it did before and it doesn't glide perfectly smoothly as it did before, but our tests indicate that it will work well anyway. We also prepared our gearbox for mounting onto the grabber.

Friday was an exciting day. Raghav continued to bother us with questions about whether our car would actually even go anywhere, so we duct taped the wheels to the gear box and drove it around a bit for him to see. After that little adventure, we got our grabber out and started messing with it. Over the last couple days, when messing with the grabber, we had to twist it slightly in various directions so that the gears would mesh. On Friday, we glued hunks of wood to it such that it was permanently twisted properly. These same hunks of wood then proceeded to attach the grabber to the gearbox. We slid the wheels onto the gearbox for testing purposes. Chuck got out the ruler. The whole thing is under nine inches wide. Yay! We knew the grabber would be entirely inside the radius of the wheel (except for some protruding pieces of wood that we would stand off once the grabber was complete) because we checked it periodically as we were designing and building it. It therefore was no surprise when it did indeed fit entirely inside the radius of the wheel, except for some protruding pieces of wood. I took three trips to the sander, and the end result of this whole processes was that the grabber swung freely inside the radius of the wheel but remained close enough to the ground to pick up a golf ball. We tested each element of the grabber with the assembly hanging from the wheels and it all worked as expected. Yay!

I have two remaining worries with regard to this project. The first is that the grabber, though inside the radius of the wheels, is not far enough inside. When both wheels press against the bucket, the bucket will protrude inside that radius between the wheels. It's possible that the grabber will still get caught on that. If it does, we will push the grabber back. If it still does, the motors in the gearbox should have enough torque to push our car back a little bit and force the grabber up. I hope.... They do have a lot of torque with that gearbox after all. My second worry is that the axles will slip inside the coupler. If this happens, I suggest that we clamp the coupler onto the axles. I have several ideas. More on those if we find our axles slipping. We probably will.