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.

Surprise Shipment

I was on standby for Omax last night, unfortunately to no avail. However, this morning we were back on track to cut! Ken made it down there to start at 5 am. When he returned to school, he had with him the components for the second drive base frame, the lift and the arm. The lift as I spoke of yesterday was being welded.

With all of these shiny new toys at our disposal, we spent yet another Saturday hard at work. The drive team split, one group focused on pop-riveting the second frame, while the other group worked on the guts (wheels, chain, all that good stuff) for the first. Anyways, issues with Andy Mark’s wheel assemblies are providing setbacks, but no worries, we’ll pick up the pace and get the drive base ready!

This might be a good time to note, if you were not already aware (my bad), we are building TWO ENTIRE robots this year!

As for the Lift, with the new weldment picture frames here, we were certainly uplifted. Lift team members spent their time rising to the challenge of putting the assemblies together, this is also going to be an ongoing task.

As for the End Effectors, we now have all the design models prepared and the remaining CAD members are back into the old routine. Focusing on the model for submission is the next priority to this sub-team. Until parts are completed for those sub-assemblies, we’ll be working on our entire robot model. Also, exciting CAD news, we finally got Vault!

Electrical/Programming got the Ultrasonic sensor working and developed a pseudo-bumper for the practice robot.

What I hear from the systems kids is that the submission documents are getting a nice overhaul/update. Danny has iteration one of the scouting sheet pretty much set and Drew is busy filling in the holes of our past. SPEAKING OF WHICH: If you have any pictures from previous outreach events, please get them to him, along with info!

That’s about it, hope I’m not missing too much, I’ll do some patchwork on Monday, I’ll hopefully have more to report on!