I’ve found Mech 250 to be one of my most interesting, fun, and time-consuming classes I’ve ever had. Coming up with unique strategies and designs, and seeing them come to life was an amazing thing to watch.
Like Brendon, I’m extremely happy with group. All members contributed the most they could. While some members were highly experienced with some of the engineering processes, others were not. Those who were not experienced did other tasks, enabling the team to work quickly and efficiently. However, the less experienced members weren’t exposed to some of the engineering processes, so that while the team got the work done, not everyone learned all the processes.
Prior to this class, the only manufacturing I had learned was from doing Robotics in high school. Only one of the two years I was in the class (we had a class too, not just a team) we participated in FIRST. However both years we participated in OCCRA (Oakland County Competitive Robotics Association) which, while a fun experience, didn’t teach us all that much about manufacturing. While we designed our robot with drawings and the like, we never used CAD during OCCRA and weren’t allowed to use precision machinery in order to keep the competition “fair.” I got used to that method of doing things; eye-balling almost everything, figuring out all the components as we went along. This class taught me that that method really isn’t the best way to do things, or even a good way. A finished machine should be precision-engineered. Planning and modeling should all be done prior to manufacturing to ensure everything fits right, works right, and will hold up. The real world of engineering doesn’t work like a high school Robotics team.
Our bot itself was quite an interesting piece of machinery; or “pieces” rather. Decepticon didn’t work quite as we had hoped, mostly due to traction issues caused by weight distribution not favoring the wheels enough. While we were never able to drive Decepticon into the opponents’ hole, it did perform its secondary function of distracting the other team quite well. Autobot performed admirably despite our decision to not use the roller due to questionable legality post-timed running and its sensitivity to the differing control boxes.
Overall I am happy we decided on the 2-bot strategy and went with it. While it may not have ended up working quite as well as hoped, it was a great learning experience. I learned how there are always going to be unique approaches to challenges, and sometimes they can work amazingly, and of course sometimes poorly, but that they’re often worth a shot.
The course could be improved mostly with clearer rules; the sandbagging for instance. We were told that sandbagging wasn’t allowed though we were later told it was allowed for the purpose of increasing traction, which is only really useful reason in this game. However it was too late at that point to change anything. Also, the rules on the “degrees of freedom” I feel should be changed. If one input is used to provide the desired output, even if the desired output involves multiple parts doing different (but not independent) things, it should still be considered a single degree of freedom even if it is done electronically; for instance, controlling a roller and a driving motor with the same joystick movement.
I could have improved my performance by making a greater effort to learn some of the engineering processes that I wasn’t as familiar with such as CAD and 3D printing. While I definitely learned about them, I didn’t learn as much as I would have liked, and not from lack of available information. I simply worked on different parts of the project.
Thank you to my teammates for working so hard and making this experience a really enjoyable one and for working so hard. And thank you to the ME250staff, for teaching me about the world of engineering and doing so in an interesting and enthusiastic way.
-Jacob Gardner
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