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This holds the notes for Sunday January 26th, 2014. Attendance. Joaquin Work Done. Today Neil and I started to build a lock and release mechanism for the kicker. It is an arm attached to an L-bracket with a triangular piece of something on the end, this allows for the bolt on the kicker to hit the triangle and slide up and over into a locked position. It pivots at the joint formed by the arm and the L-bracket. After is is locked the arm pivots on the point mentioned above and releases the kicker. (See picture for a detailed design, can be found in the shooter folder labeled "lock/release")

Today we split up to do different tasks for the new shooter. Neil (who has helped us a lot the past few days) worked with Mr. Peterson to try to complete the locking and releasing mechanism that we worked on yesterday (see Other Notes Section). Kavi and RJ continued to CAD the arm and the kicker with help from various mentors. I believe they are very close to finishing. Jay and I worked with Tom to build a new lock/release mechanism that would also function as a cocking mechanism. This was design is very similar to the cam that was used last year to feed frisbees into the frisbee shooter. The only difference is that there are two cam-like objects that spin independently, one attached to a motor, another attached to the kicker arm. The motor-cam spins until the pointy part has almost spun past the arm-cam to cock the shooter. The, when we are ready to fire it spins the rest of the way releasing the arm-cam to spin freely and allows the spring to fire the shooter. After this we had a large meeting with the catcher subteam to discuss dimensions of our respective parts and integration for the two mechanisms. After a long time catcher agreed to build two designs and shooter agreed to look up some stuff, such as the spring constant, to have better dimensions for catcher to work with.

We need to find a reliable and efficient way to cock, lock, and release our shooter arm. This is less of a challenge and more of a design choice as long as the designs we have continue to work

We should look up the spring constant and any other necessary facts about our spring and our design and then talk with catcher about what we've learned. We need to finish and mount the dual cam mechanism after we test the lock and release that is already mounted. These tests should be done various times to ensure the reliability and consistency of each design. If possible we should try to lock down one design since Wed. we will present our progress to the rest of the team.

We are still behind schedule, but I am confident that we can catch up relatively quickly.