RoboCup
blogger.com was blocked in Turkey, I wasn't able to blog anything for a while.
Somehow we managed to finish a half-ass robocup robot, wrote our TDP and shot a video. After all the efforts we put through, we could not qualify for the event, which is heart-breaking and missed a great opportunity to play in our home turf. I'll try to explain part by part what did we do and what went wrong.
At first we bought off the shelf omni-wheels, which had larger diameter than our initial calculations, but we wanted to shoot the qualification video with the those wheels and manufacture our own after the qualification. Since we needed to build at least 2 robots we ordered 8 more wheels, 4 of them for the second robot and 4 spares. The wheels got lost on their way from Canada to Turkey, and we never get them. We spent a sleepless night and designed our wheels and get them 4 days before the deadline.
We had our DC motors in our hands by mid January. At 11.1V our motors give roughly 37000 rpm. We thought that we can find gears easily which we could not. Then we stuck with 2:1 ratio which was faster than our intentions. While pushing things up in the last days to finish the project, we blew up 5 of 8 dc motors. To make the gears on the motor shaft and the wheel shaft, we drilled the holes on the motor mount a little larger than it supposed to be, this caused a great problem, which the high rpm motors moved and the gear meshing is screwed up. At this time we changed our game plan and tried to finish just one robot with 3 wheels. 
The dribbler part was created in lathe engine and we did not put much thought on it. A small brushed motor and esc is connected to the middle of the dribbler by a belt. Actually in the end the dribbler is going to be thicker in the sides and thins to the middle. 
We did not call the project off, just took a break like a month and already making plans for the next years competition and ordering parts.
Here is the TDP and qualification video that we took.
2011 Neu Islanders TDP
Qualification Video
