Team Reboot held an open team discussion and searched the internet for cone capture ideas.  Simon came up with the idea for the first prototype. After various options were discussed, the team decided to utilize a claw-like system.  We prototyped by bending a couple of thin spacer brackets and attaching them to servos. This system was really slippery, and the claw was really bulky, so we went back to the drawing board. The team designed the claws in Onshape and used the team 3D printer to produce the first version (Image to the left on top). They were attached to structure and gears and are powered by a single servo. The claws we had kept slipping, and dropping the cone because there was too much tension between the claw and the cone. Therefore, we decided to create a claw that could hold rubber bands, between the tip and base of the claw. Marissa designed them in Onshape, editing the original claw to make it longer and so that it could support the rubber bands (Image to the left on the bottom). This claw design worked much better, and kept its grip on the cone instead of slipping.

Our team knew that we needed a way to raise and lower our claw, so that was one of the first things that we researched. We found out that GoBilda had something called viper slides which we saw most other teams using, but all the kits were sold out, and we had to order all of the pieces separately. When the pieces came, the team split up and Marissa, with a couple other members pitching in occasionally, assembled the slides. This was a bit of a struggle at first, since we ordered all the pieces separately, and we only had assembly instructions for one set of slides, while ours needed to be made of multiple assemblies put together in order to be tall enough. After several assemblies and dis-assemblies, we finally got the pieces put together in the correct order, and strung it. The stringing also caused a lot of problems, since we could never seem to get the string to have the correct amount of tension, and the string would keep getting tangled. After a lot of trial and error, we had the slides on the robot and running up and down on a motor attached to the string.

While trying to figure out where everything should go on our robot, we realized that our hub did not have a good mount place, and the way we had it on our robot the screws didn’t line up (We had two Tetrix plates bolted together to make one larger plate, and the holes on the hub did not match up well with those on the plate). We decided that the best course of action would be to create a custom mount for the hub, rather than continue with the setup we currently had. We designed a box-like structure, and set the Gobilda hole patterns into it. 

Our team realized that it took valuable time to try and line up our robot with the poles. When we realized this, Marissa began to design a bracket on OnShape. The first prototype was a simple circle with a notch in it (Top picture). From there we realized that it would be a better idea to have a rectangle, and we added the GoBilda hole pattern. We also made the hole in the front round shaped, so that it could hold the cones as well. (Drawing on the top is a prototype, drawing below is the current design).