As a veteran of the FIRST Robotics Competition in high school, I probably had more experience with the design process coming in than most of my classmates and teammates. I had twice before seen a design through from beginning to end, and done my share of CAD modeling and part fabrication along the way. That experience, while it helped me to guide my team with a steady hand, did make me a bit overconfident in my own abilities and ideas. I did however manage to keep an open mind throughout, which wasn’t hard, what with the multitude of Type A personalities on our team.
Working with my team was a somewhat frustrating, but ultimately rewarding experience. Every member of our team, myself included, had strong opinions on the direction of our design at various points, occasionally to the point of stubbornness. This may be one of the reasons our design process bogged down a few times fairly late in the process. However, every decision we eventually made was made as a team, having explored multiple options, and I believe this due diligence made our final product better because of it (albeit at a slower pace than we would have liked). Every member of our team brought something different to the table, and I think we all complemented each other well.
I do appreciate the opportunity this class gave me to revisit using SolidWorks (which I used on my FIRST team), as well as machining on the mill, lathe, etc. because it’s been some time since I’ve used any of them. It’s always good to stay practiced, and I feel much more comfortable around all of them as a result of this opportunity, which is never a bad thing.
So in the end, our machine came together, almost exactly the way we designed it. With a few tweaks, it functioned about as well as we could have hoped. There are only a few things that bother me about our final machine. One: we had an issue with two gears meshing because I failed to adequately constrain the end of a motor shaft in the design. While we came up with a mostly functional fix, it is a problem that could have been avoided with a little more effort early on. Two: We did not anticipate quite the pace at which the matches would play out, possibly because we did not have much time to practice with our functional machine or other teams. That could have led us to Three: our lead screw extension mechanism was simply geared too low to score quickly at the beginning of the match. Had we dropped the planetary gearbox from 16:1 to 5:1, I think we could have scored much faster and made a much bigger statement in the competition. Oh well. We learn more from our failures than our successes. Live and learn (to test more) I suppose.
I must say, at this point I am pretty relieved this course has come to a close. While it is always exhilarating to see parts of my ideas go from vague sketches to concrete, functioning reality, I am thoroughly exhausted. The last three weeks, especially, have driven me (and as far as I can tell, my classmates) to our collective wits’ end. Some of the fault undoubtedly lies with myself and my team, as we underwent several minor and major overhauls of our design plans fairly late in the game. However it still seemed to me that the course was unnecessarily back-loaded. I believe some of the early milestones could certainly be condensed, to give us more time to actually work on our designs, before the work in our other classes begins to pile up as well. That brings me to another point. I would have really liked to have the game rules much earlier than we did. I appreciate that this format is new to the staff as well as the students, but fleshing out a concept is extremely difficult and tedious when you have only a vague idea of the problem’s constraints. Even if the rules have to be updated frequently at first, it is still preferable to any attempt to design without any references.
Sorry, if that was a bit of a rant. I would like to say that I did not expect this class to be anything like this, and am certainly glad it was. I can’t imagine making a tape measure or a flashlight could be nearly as exciting or engaging.
No comments:
Post a Comment