Wobbling wheels

Well the wheels were wobbling, or to be more exact they seemed to be forming a nice v. Sorry can we pause for just a second and reverse time, we are a bit to far ahead in the story, yes thank you very much, just slide back a bit more, and stop there. Lithium ion batteries, chunky boys, that’s what we settled for; a five inches long, two inches wide and half an inch thick device, we had found our new power supply. With this additional power of cores there came additional problems, mainly it did not fit, the battery did not fit in the chase. Fortunately for us we had foreseen this and included that detail in our newly completed plans, so it was time to cue the music and hue a great block of wood into a desirable shape.

As one can see the decorations are yet to come, but for now this is Jeff’s final layout (tweaks may come in the future), why the pen well Jeff has to communicate some how. Now with a proper frame and a more powerful powers supply we commenced programming for the challenges, the first challenge we chose to tackle was the line reading challenge, to warm us up. After two long nights (I mean to long nights for the coders) the program was done and the tests commenced.

It all seemed to be going swimmingly but something seemed off, the robot was following the line perfectly (it does have trouble with the corners, some fine tuning is still required) and Jeff moved at speed; but slowly over time it slowed down, it began missing the corners by more grievous amounts and Jeff got closer to the floor. What was happening was that the wheels were not held in place properly (it was only held together with sticky paper) and the new weight made the wheels bend inwards, creating a nice upside down v shape. This caused all sorts of problems.

The upside down v mainly effected the driving and efficiency of the motors, and soon it was impossible to make Jeff turn even when manually controlling him. The speed was also hit hard, by the end of the day he was reduced to relative crawl. We need to sort out this issue, it will not effect us in the long run because ultimately we are going to screw the motors in but until we do that, this bending is going to severely effect our tests and we don’t yet have a solution.

Join us next week to see if the snowflakes fix the bendy problem (don’t worry the solution is almost finished, I think) and in the meantime, stay snow flakey.