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

Building

Hello all,

Today robotics started at 10am and went on until we were satisfied with the progress. I wouldn’t know exactly where we finished since I had to leave halfway through.  But one thing is for sure, we made lots of progress. As I said before, the goal was to finish up the physical aspects of the competition robot for today to hand it off for wiring. Ken says that this year we want to have a fully functional robot go in the bag on tag day so that when we get to Portland in March we don’t spend all of “Thursday” debugging instead of practicing on the field. In his opinion, this first opportunity is something that could significantly affect our performance in Portland. For those of you who are not familiar, the team is scheduled to go to Portland on March 8 but a few students and coach generally go about a day earlier to take the robot out of the bag and work on it as hard and diligently as possible. By the time the whole team gets there, the pit crew has the “ball rolling” and program debugging is still going on. This year we really want to get some practice time in on the real field and get the chance to tweak anything for our benefit.

On another note, the robot is looking quite handsome with orange chords on the rollers and will have some panels mounted on it showcasing our sponsors Boeing and OMAX. I have yet to learn where our other sponsors will go, but the water-jetted panel looks really nice. I am excited to mount it because it is more than a pretty face, it is actually going to help us keep the frame from twisting a bit, which is starting to happen, though mainly on the chassis.

That is it for today, thank you for reading!

Camila