Menu

Socrate's Thots


Team Bios:


Maheera Bawa '22

My name is Maheera and I am some combo of a 2 and 6 sophomore. I like rowing and making hyperloop pods and the occasional crack-head hours dance party. I also like mentoring and coaching rowing for AMphibious Achievement! Swirls up! Also Abba slaps. I'm a noob to robotics but learned a lot thanks to my super smart team and MASLAB.

Anita Dey Barsukova '22

Hi!! My name is Anita and I am a Course 2 (Mechanical engineering) major and Course 6 (Computer science) minor. In my free time I enjoy fencing and Ukrainian folk dance. I'm excited to start work on our team's MASLAB robot!!

Tareq Dandachi '22

Aashini Shah '22

Hi guys! I'm a sophomore doubling in 2A-Medical Devices and 6-1. When I'm not working on MASLAB, I'm learning how to throw bowls and working on interior design of trucks for my UROP. The last book I read was The Disappearing Spoon and I would love to explain to anyone who is interested how to play practical jokes on your friends using gallium.

Drew (Drewcifer) Johns '22

My name is Drew, I'm wicked smat. Like actually not though. I am a course 2-A-16 3-A-6-1... yes its a mouthful, but basically it means I overwork myself and for some reason find my education valuable. Other than that I like cars, watching things blow up and Lucifer (the show not the Judaeo-Christian figure). Additionally, Star Trek is awesome and Kirk is the best captain, I speak Klingon, I really really hate programming, and for some reason or another I am generally attracted to trouble. You can debate whether it finds me or I find it though.


Journal


Terms to help you survive this reading:

Hookah: The mechanism to extract cylinders from the dispenser, named for the original idea of using brushes styled after cleaning implements for hookah pipes. Basically our robot's fingers. Hookah has two fingers of different lengths that have a sort of scissor mechanism held open by springs. This enables us to "cheat" and attempt to acquire more than one cylinder at once; yes, we want to beat the system.

Succy / Succah: A splendidly curved trio of pronged blades that perfectly conform to the curvature of the cylinder and beckon it up a ramp to store it until such time as the mehanism is reversed and the proper color of cylinder is dispensed. Basically like the mouth of a vaccum cleaner that sucks everything in from the floor.


Week 1

This here is us in an intense planning stage, we got ideas on the board and we down to experiment. At this point we have two main ideas, the first being “succy” and the second being hookah. Both have the power to set us apart on the great singular battlefield upon which our “child” a.k.a “Scotty” will test his mettle against all challengers. From here we hope to only push the limits of design. -Drewcifer Johns

Level Up, welcome to day two of ideation and construction. The ideas are flowing and sliding around like a greased baby sliding on ice. We have developed as a team and taken our respective positions. Myself as meme master general of the meme army and all of its loyal soldiers; Tareq the loyal coder beholder of the sacred texts of computer vision and programming, also wicked donutting picker upper skills; Anita, the master fencer, the proclaimer of justice and general powerhouse of the cell she is without a doubt the wall upon which dreams could be built. Maheera the paragon of hope and desire, with her we will not lack for pride and we will not falter in our mission to crush the competition; finally Aashini the great giver of looks, the wizard of Oz, and slayer of my memeness to great sadness. To be honest that wraps up most of week one, as we spent most of our time working on CAD and slaying the demons that live in Solidworks. By the end of it all my mental resources were exhausted and for my disservice I was sent to time out and to great joy fell to sleep.

-Drewcifer Johns

Here's a video of our first prototype of succy. We used a drill bit to spin the blades and catapult the cylinders up a ramp! None us were in gear for that RPM! Link to Youtube - Video of Prototyping Blade mechanism


Week 2

Here are some delicious photos of me and my peeps hard at work. We are working on improving the design of “succy” and “hookah”. At this point my brain was about to start a very bad heavy smoking habit with all the programming knowledge being dropped in on it. Honestly that was why I am wearing the beanie in the picture above otherwise the room might begin to smell of charbroiled napalm.

We are also working on the code for machine vision, that Tareq is developing using OpenCV. Soon our boi will be able to see the light for the first time. Like seeing the fireworks on the fourth of July just before the fire nation attacked. Sadly however, I am tired and I am getting looks from Aashini and told I am small child who does not deserve to figure out how to work facebook. I am hurt, but hey I guess I deserve it after I retroactively decided for the team that the boi will forever be named “Scotty” after Montgomerey Scott from Star Trek. Anyways this is Drewcifer signing off, beam me up scotty. -Drewcifer Johns

Enjoy this picture of me in time out :)

We realized that the brushes approach wouldn't be optimal when we were trying to get the cylinders off, so we reapproached the idea with a scissoring mechanism. Bet you can't guess what we used for our initial prototyping!

[Link to Youtube - Video of Prototyping scissor finger mechanism] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H--yyEaVuH0&feature=youtu.be)


Week 3

Week 3 saw a deep dive into the hole of Deep lounge in Next House during the evenings. We met nearly every day in this lightless room and stared at the monitor, praying for the motors to move. During the day, we took our robot sightseeing all over MIT's campus. We cried in the EDS, were scared witless in Deep lounge, and played questionable games in the IDC. As all of the parts were laser cut, we spent many an hour forcing the t-joints together and smuggling screws in our jacket pockets.

Link to Youtube - Video of basic robot moving

Life looked so promising.....until OUR BATTERY DIED.

Can we have a moment of silence for the battery we lost and the cause of death indicated by this error message?

We lost a lot of time, we were running out of resources, but we sold(i)ered on and resolved that we would emerge into week 4 with our bonds to each other and to our faithful robot stronger than ever.

-Aashini Shah


Week 4

Week 4 - the endgame. In week 3 we finished 3d printing and laser cutting the components to make hookah and succy. This week we assembled them and connected them to servos to bring them to life and see if they actually work.

This pic is Maheera assembling hookah's fingers, and Tareq bein real spooky from behind:

This pic is the blades for vaccy drying after we used epoxy to assemble it. Note the spacers to prevent the blades from moving out of the range of the holes in the ramp, even in the event that the epoxy holding the blades down breaks free.

This is us being generally exhausted but also s p i c y

In the end, we experienced many difficulties -- for example, the gear and gear track on the elevator mechanism for hookah did not mesh exactly, so when the servo rotates the gear, the gear is popped off after a few rotations.

Similarly, the mechanism for attaching the blade mechanism to the servo that rotates the blades broke after being severely glued down and otherwise attached, leading us to abandon this mechanism, as we were really really running out of time.

Also, due to adjustments of the positioning of the ramp, we had to cut the base shorter, and move the ball and caster closer to the drive wheels. This caused a very strange bucking motion of the robot -- it looks ridiculous. Our CS genius Tareq derived a method of correcting for this using oscillation of the motors.

However, the mechanism for hookah's fingers worked beautifully -- the servo compresses the spring, closing the scissor mechanism and opening it up again.

We will try to make everything work that we can until the competition, but its all pretty janky at this point. Thanks for reading and we'll see what happens at the competition!

~ Anita ;)