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!

Tower Power

Yesterday, being the end of the semester, meant that today we didn’t have school. Would this stop us from going back? No, when there is work to be done, you can bet a skunk or two will crawl out to get it done. We had a small crowd today (4 in fact).

With limited man-power, we decided to focus our efforts on completing a tower. We needed some 2×6′s which we could cut down to size, so our expedition brought us to the gym. My jaw literally dropped:  the small gym hasn’t looked this clean and organized since 2008! Thanks to all who made it happen.

As we trekked back, I saw the current field components and thought a report was in order. Currently the racks are in fact completed and are waiting to be mounted. After a decent amount of cutting, drilling and screwing, we ended up with wood shavings all over us (thanks Coach, you have a warped sense of humor.) By the end of the work day, this stood tall:

On a less happy note, our trip to Omax was cancelled as Kevin’s wife is sick and he needed to stay home and watch his kid. A robot is important, but family comes FIRST! Our weldment of the lift was picked up today by Ken, so not all was lost. We may have lost an important opportunity today, but we are still in good shape. Just think of what we have accomplished so far:

-We’ve made a beautiful drive frame, one of our best yet and it’s under 17lbs!

-We’ve come up with an arsenal of prototypes to aid design and provide rationale.

-We’ve developed working concepts of the mini-bot and deployment mechanisms.

-The Lift, Arm and End Effectors are all solid models after many iterations. With any luck, we’ll have them together soon!

-We are staying mindful of our over-arching vision as well as our schedule.

I’d say we’re doing good so far. What do you think?