Looking In The Mountains For Toes Ma Goat Up @ Mt. Vernon

Hello Everyone,

Skunk Works has been really busy and behind on blogs. Last weekend we attended our second competition of the season at Mt. Vernon. On Friday the advanced crew came up early to set up the pit and get the robot inspected before Saturday morning hit. On Saturday by the end of the day our team was ranked first. After finishing our qualification matches on Sunday, our final ranking at the Mt. Vernon competition was first. We allied with IRS (1318) and team the mountaineers (4654). Biting our nails we finally made it to the finals round. Our opposing alliance teams 3663 (CPR), 4911 (Cybernights), and Adna pirates  (5748), did an amazing job and we had a fun weekend compeiting against and with all the teams. Winning the compeition and receiving the industrial design award for our robot, our team couldn’t be happier with how the comepition went. Looking forward we are getting ready for our next competition in philomath Oregon next week.

In the stands being as skunks do.

Skunks running on low sleep means we get to see this at least once every compeition.

Our alliance was so awesome and we loved working with both teams!

Stay Smelly,
Maryam Shafa (Community Outreach Lead)

A Drought of Work

Hello Everyone,

Electrical has hit a dry spot this week. Unfortunately, we have had very little to do. That or we’re just lazy. Either way, we haven’t done much. But we have done some stuff.

As our next competition draws near, we have been preparing. However this hasn’t meant that electrical has had much to do other than some troubleshooting. Other than fixing a few loose wires, and chasing down a nasty pneumatic leak, things have been unusually quiet. And that’s a good thing, because it means we (mostly) did our job right the first time for once, but I’ve been secretly hoping something would break so we’d get to fix it and get a break from documentation work that just makes us look lazy. We can’t win.

We have however helped other sub-teams here and there. Some of our members helped design and build team with a revised version of our robot cart. The wheels actually spin now, so it’s actually a cart now. Hopefully our robot won’t take a nasty tumble onto one of our team members. It better not, with all the metal shavings that ended up embedded in our skin.

We also spent some time improving the Operator Interface for our drive team, since they can’t stop complaining about layout and changing what things do and stuff. And then media team took forever to make the graphics. But hey, at least it kept us occupied for a day. After stabbing ourselves with wires and smashing our fingers with buttons, we made great improvements to the original design. Maybe they’ll finally stop complaining now.

Even though we have done some stuff, its been very slow going, and we are charged and ready to go. Electrical is ready for some excitement at our next competition this weekend.

Does this picture look familiar? Believe it or not it actually is different from the one on the last post. Packing took us all of about five minutes, because we never really unpacked in the first place.

The practice robot on the new cart, which actually works this time.

Us writing this very blog post. Yes, it is one of the most eventful things we’ve done this week. And yes, it does take all five of us to write one blog post. We are good at delegating work.

Stay Smelly,
The Electrical Sub-Team