Day 10: AND THEY'RE OFF

or "BUT FIRST"
or "now I am just avoiding doing day 10.5's work"

So we worked on building that 1:18 train
and we worked and we worked and a tonne of iterations later
we had a thing that looked much like this-

a monster

and stalled.
with more torque it STALLED.
so we loosened everything to eliminate friction,
and then it STILL accelerated less than the 1:15 train.
so that was fun,

we went back to the 1:15 train-
and updated the structure a bit
then managed 3rd place in the final race with a time of 7.96s
pretty okay, pretty okay.

Day 9.5: DON'T GO BETA

or "at least opensource is still awesome some of the time"

This day was not such a good day for robotics or legos or torque

So I attempted to build a gear train with a 1:18
and after several false starts and breaking down and rebuilding the Mystical Unicorn and digging around in gears looking for an easier combo

these are actually kind of sharp

and after going through several combination that all lead to horrible clicking noises and straining sounds and structures that tore themselves apart (yes really)
I learned something important
and that is that lego math does not really work out with gears on the diagonals.

GOSH DARN IT.

Day 9: OKAY LETS GET SERIOUS

or "serious like mecha-exoskeletons for the masses"

Or as serious as you can only get about a robot called 'MYSTICAL UNICORN'
(I am expert at naming things mystical unicorn,
our Jeopardy team for CS review was also Mystical Unicorn)

because, as i have said, Mystical Unicorn is a SPEED DEMON,
coming in 3rd in the first trial for the torque challenge with a time of 8.5 seconds.

HIGH TENSION!!

 The gear train has a ratio of 1:15 using a 24, a 40 and two 8 tooth gears, same as we left her on Friday-

oh, this picture again.

BUT THAT IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH
because Lucia and I have been nursing a bit of healthy competition and she beat us with a time of 8.4
(SO CLOSE)

and also because she accelerates a lot, meaning that she doesn't have quite enough torque
(but mostly in the spirit of competition!)

based on the times for other ratios we are looking to get a ratio higher than our current one but less than 1:25,

so we are aiming for an 18 or 20

Day 8: MYSTICAL UNICORN JUNIOR JUNIOR

or "how did it take me 'till October to put this up here?"

I am full of nostalgia,
great nostalgia for the original Mystical Unicorn-

RIP MYSTICAL UNICORN

who was of similar construction to our latest project-

Do not tell Helena that I am calling it 'MysticalUnicornJunior'

The MysticalUnicornII is a SPEED DEMON.

She goes about .3m/s (we think) while carrying a 1kg weight.

Helena and I got her moving with the help of a gear train, it is pretty neat that she moves at all!

(seriously! look how big that weight is by comparison! huge!!)
So, here is where the magic happens-

there's a 24 tooth, a 40 tooth and a pair of 8 tooth gears in there

the gear train.

like shifting gears on a bike, raising the gear ratio increases the torque.

(at the expense of speed, but so it goes)

The thing to do now is figure out if we can make her move even faster by decreasing the torque.

We'll have to see if we can get her any faster with out stalling.

Helena (my new parter!) can be found at her blog- Adventures in Robotic Design Studio,

check it out!