Week 2, the reality of the task is starting to hit.

We are slowly picking up pace but it is becoming apparent that this is no easy task. There are so many different elements to building Geronimo which we must implement all together. This week was interesting since it was a week where we used the water jet cutter extensively and many mistakes were made during the mechanical creation of the robot. We had many arguments about details, one of the main problem we had was that holes were not to dimension; we could not fit holes properly to the rods we had. This was due to the unpredictable offset of the machines we were using. Also we had a general idea of each component for Geronimo but not their details. We should have went into their details in much more depth before building them. This resulted in a very not stable set of wheels and gears; we used acrylic for the gears which started to break really quickly, the wheels were not straight, and the wheels would even get stuck sometimes.

However there was a success this week; the suspension system. We went from idea to concept in a straight forward manner, and they worked very well! It was a great feeling to see something we designed work well and we had a lot of fun pushing down on the chassis to see it push back up and oscillate slightly. Although we did have few issues securing the rods holding the suspension system properly. We 3d printed c-clamps which seemed to get the work done for the moment.

Another thing I did this week was to build the QRD sensors for the line following of the robot. This was easy and straight forward. We came across an issue: the h-bridges I built last week started to fail for reasons we were not able to figure out and so I made the call to ditch it and have my teammate who is more experienced in electronics to solder new ones, we also took the opportunity to make them more compact.

Mohamed-Ali Hached