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5. The Blue Knights Piece

Although vex IQ has covered many important aspects of the playing game, our team 5081F The Blue Knights feels that a big part of previous games that were overlooked was the balls. The balls are circular and slick which makes them hard to pick up, and to add on to that understanding there is also no good base for a ramp. We have competed in squared away and have tried to make a ball lift and every time we tried we failed. We began to notice that the main problem for this was the ramp. A key aspect in a good ball intake is a good solid ramp for the balls to get the upward momentum in a ball intake. The piece will increase the functionality of ball intakes and will in turn create a better more stable ball intake.    The overall aspect of the piece that we created is a 4by4 offset right angled beam flipped so that the two beams are pointing skywards. Our piece would contribute to the overall game play and robot because it will give the tapered game object an upward motion without having to build a specialized ramp. This piece will reduce time building and will increase the effectiveness of the robot.   The program we used was tinkercad. Tinkercad is an overall great 3-D designing and printing website. It contains all the tools that helped build our piece. We had many trial and errors while we were building the piece. One mistake that we made was trying to make our own piece. What I mean by this is that we used a lot of clear cylinders that we used as spots for connector pins to fit in. but after a while we found out it was going to take ages to complete. So finally we looked on the website CAD - Resources for VEX IQ – Knowledge Base. This gave us a download that we used into our piece. Once we had the piece on our designing board we had to attach the pieces together by using a cube and increasing its height but decreasing its width. That is how our piece came together.   I learned from this project how to manipulate objects digitally and how to carry files over. I also learned how to work with tinkercad and as being somebody who is not as tech savvy as other people felt like a major success and ultimately showed me how with a little bit of persistence you can achieve great things. Although I am more pens and paper I feel like I am going to need to know how to use a 3D printing software in order to do well in jobs, So yes I will probably use my experience on this project to help me in future 3D printing projects. 3D printing websites can help me and my competitive robotics team because we can make a scale robot online and then build a full scale model based on our modeler one online. I don't really know what I want to have as a career but being someone who likes STEM I am probably going to have a career that requires me to have 3D printing knowledge ahead of time.   Here is the piece so you can veiw it The Piece