Pre-Championship Missions

Hi Everyone,

I apologize for the lack of posts lately. We will go back to day by day posts starting today.

To recap really quickly, we are getting ready for the championship, fixing up the robot, packing, making trip plans and more. As Championship rushed to the near present, we have uploaded videos up on YouTube channel and will be in contention for several awards, such as Chairman’s, the website award, and Dean’s list for our Dean’s list finalist Sydney Miller!

As of last week specifically, our Marketing team also made buttons and designed a new practice shirt for when we go to St. Louis on Wednesday. I am excited to wear it, as it says “Let’s Play Robots!” with FIRST Championship and the year labeled on the back.

From the robot perspective, our practice bot got new motors to drive the shooter wheel, courtesy of team 2910 (Jack in the Bot)! We were so thrilled and relieved to get these motors, especially since they are no longer available. As I said, the motors are for the shooter wheel, they are two FisherPrice 0673 motors mounted onto the same gear box close to our shooter. We went to Spokane with two sets, one set a spare from the practice bot and the other mounted on the competition robot.  With each of our regionals we had those motors spinning the shooter wheel to more than 2,000 rpm, and when we got to Spokane, one of our motors got a floating armature, perhaps one of the reasons why our shooter was shrieking and taking abnormally longer to get up to speed. It was a really nice gesture from team 2910 to give us their motors; they deserve recognition for their gracious professionalism as much as they have received for their Spirit.

Other than that we basically only met on Tuesday and Thursday to debrief traveling to St. Louis and to pack. We did make a mount for the pneumatic cylinder that we so professionally call “Pokey-Stick” and plan to use for triple balancing. Also, today we have a meeting, and we are dressing up in kakis, belt, and practice shirt. We are welcoming a Boeing Frontier magazine photographer that will be coming to get some pictures to accompany an article to be published in the Boeing employee magazine. What a great way to inform our sponsors of our activities and spread FIRST farther into the Boeing community.

Well, either I or Liam will let you know how today went, hopefully with a few pictures.

Thanks for sticking around, and as Liam says,

Stay Smelly!

Camila

Love is in the air compressor

Happy Valentine ’s Day!

Courtesy of Drew for providing us a list of Valentine hook up lines, love was in the air compressor tonight. <3

(after we pulled out the camera)

To begin with, I must apologize for the brevity of the posts lately as it has been a busy few days of homework and robotics. Nonetheless, today we got to do some fun stuff that I wanted to share with you.  This time of the year is when the wiring of the robot gets done and we cross our fingers that it stays under the weight limit (so far the conveyor assembly is a lovingly 37lbs, by the way).  As expected, the competition chassis and conveyor assembly got handed down to our electrical team and now we are getting to do some really fun stuff. Personally, I love stripping wires and soldering.  But yesterday we were a little silly, forgetting steps here and there – from which we learned for today. The story goes as follows <3 :

First, Jordan and I got our stripping tool and our new electrical box to solder a wire to the leads of the first motor of the night.

We fondly placed the shrink wrap on the wire and soldered, but when we tried to slide it over, the shrink wrap had contracted already… (as you may recall shrink wrap shrinks with heat; how silly of us to forget).

Well then, because we are so Olympic, we forgot to put the shrink wrap in during our second try and soldered the wire onto the motor leads (I’m sure you can guess where this is going.  I wish we would have thought of electrical tape before taking it apart though).

Eventually…with a good number of tries and some experience, we did complete the task. Below is a picture of us struggling to fix our mistakes during this failure-stricken process. I just couldn’t help but to get a picture of our fingers in distress. Man, working with wires takes a lot of patience! Thankfully we did much better today.

Electrical work from Monday

The beauty of wiring after things have been assembled

More electrical pictures with work being done on the chassis:

Working on wiring for the chassis

On another note, the build team installed pulleys on the practice conveyor assembly and made lots of progress. I am not allowed to show you a ton of the robot, but here are a few pictures of what we did.

Curtis hard at work

Michael measuring

Well, thanks go out once again to Aiden for the pictures, his phone is so magnificently handy.

See you all tomorrow, and thanks for following the smell even today

Camila