Tuesday – A Typical Day in the Office….

Looking better each day

To everyone that may smell a little… skunky

Hey everyone!

Another day in the shop, except fot the fact that today marks the day that is exactly half way through the build season. Congratulations to everyone that is involved with this great effort, we are halfway there!! Besides that, we made more progress on the drive base assembly. Further progress however, is delayed until Friday, when we waterjet more parts for the robot, mainly the conveyor side panels and shooter components. Pictures of the drive base below.

The marketing team is in full swing today, having finished quite a bit of work on the website. It looks great, so go check it out! (skunkworks1983.com). The team has also designed the new shirt. It is under wraps until it is actually printed, produced, and delivered, but you guys will be the first to get a picture, skunk’s honor. The sponsor posters have also been designed, along with new banners. Nice job guys!

The biggest problem to date has been the weight of the robot. To quote Ken “we will be pretty light… probably famous last words though.” And indeed, we are in the process of shaving off every tenth of a pound we can, be it from the type of material we use or the amount of “cheesing” we do to the material.

I dont have much more to say today, other than thanks for reading and:

Stay Smelly!

Liam Burke

Looking more like a drive base each day

These wheels aren't going to look like this during competition. I hope.

Chassis Love

Hello all!

Tonight the meeting was another one of those where we came in and went out straight to work. We did riveting and drilling for the chassis and the practice chassis looked much closer to finished than our competition one did by the end of the meeting. I must say there is some pressure there,  being the competition chassis riveters and drillers, because as we work, we know we are expected to make reasonably fewer mistakes. We sang to the shop music as we pop riveted and deburred the pointy edges of the chassis. O brave shop; that has such music in it!

On a bit of a side note, I am excited about this year’s battery placement on the base of the robot. It just fits so snuggly into the bottom of our chassis! It will be important to notice that we want a low center of mass on our robot so that we avoid falling over when going over the 2 by 4 across the field or the bridges, which I’m sure you already knew. As we work on the chassis we are amazed at how skinny it actually is. This low battery positioning makes us more constrained from tipping and just looks plain awesome!

Unfortunately, I am going to have to keep this post short because the night is ending faster than I expected. This year is rushing by with lots of excitement and fresh new faces ready to learn and be useful around the shop (and all other aspects of robotics).

As far as the OI goes, it has been CADed for visual purposes though now we need to have a conversation with Coach Steele, the programmers and electrical mentor to insure that all components have been addressed. As Mr. Miller put it, it will be much easier to change something now than to change it once we start building. Today the programmers worked on the Microsoft Kinect controlling last year’s drive base. What a challenge this smells like!

Until tomorrow =)

Camila