Balancing Act

We finished so many projects yesterday that today was a restarting day. Some of the projects we started on were prototyping ideas for lowering the bridge, prototyping a roller for the front of the robot, making the body for the mascot, and practicing balancing.

The biggest excitement was that we got the robot driving. Colin came and did a really nice job fixing the programming for the robot. It was a very proud moment to see what we have so far driving around the shop. Bryce spent some time getting use to the new tank drive system (last year we had mecanum wheels). He balanced the robot on the bridge a few times too.

The big build projects involved scraping the gate concept. Originally, we made a gate that would hopefully stop balls from coming in to our robot and lower the bridge. We got a lot of comments on our youtube page advising us in a different direction and we saw some other ideas so we decided to scrap it. Instead, we are going to have these things we call tusks that bring the bridge down and a pvc pipe with surgical tubing acting as a sweeper pulling balls in. We are half way there on both ideas. These should be finished by Monday or Tuesday.

The PR team started working on the body of the mascot. The other big project for the PR team was making interview videos to put on a member profile page on this blog. These should be very interesting.

After an awesome day like yesterday where we finished so many things and had so much progress, inevitably there will be a little bit of a let down. The team still worked hard and started some big new projects today. We are meeting on Saturday to work some more and then hang out with some Rock Band and pizza.