Fasten Your Safety Belts

Sorry for the late post tonight. The three big projects for today were putting the robot parts all together, building the hoop apparatus, and continuing to make the mascot head. A couple new videos on YouTube to check out as well.


Bydlon bought more belts (thus the title) for the gatherer last night so Ryan spent most of the early part of the afternoon fixing the gatherer dowels to work with the added belts. The added surface area of the additional belts really helped catch the balls and propel them up from the ground. Then Bryce, Bydlon, and Ryan worked on attaching the shooter to the top of the gatherer. The big advancement here was that we decided to switch the shooter around so it shoots over the electrical box. Kind of a big change but it makes mounting it and getting the balls to the shooter wheel much easier. HUGE MOMENT watching the balls be picked up and shot all in one motion from the driver station. Colin and Megan worked hard on fixing the programming issues with the shooter and gatherer. Now it's refining the process including (hopefully) a lazy susan (for turning the shooter), adjusting the angle (for shooting from different distances), and attaching the camera (for vision targeting). So not much to do... Not.

Another project that Damien, Spencer, and Jordan worked on was putting all of the wood together to form the base of the hoop apparatus. This will be key for refining and fixing the shooting mechanism. All that's left is buying the hoops and attaching those to the backboards. The robot room is completely full with the hoop apparatus, the bridge, the bump plus all of our other robotics pieces. It's kind of a mess right now.

Jesse and Steph continued their diligent work on the mascot helmet. They are really close to getting done with it though. They are even at the point where they tested spray paint on different test surfaces (cardboard, duct tape, and hot glue) to see how it looks. It looks fantastic.

Other small projects included:

• More people proofreading the Business Plan by Jenna.
• Bringing some pieces over to Alex Tech for prototyping the sweeper in front of the gatherer. (done by Brandon and Tyler)
• Finishing up team member interviews

Another productive day with lots of rewards. Bydlon is going to a programming class in the Cities tomorrow but will be back in time to open the shop for work. Hopefully we will have a smoother transition from the gatherer to the shooter and made some progress on a lazy susan prototype. We also want to finish the helmet (other than painting) and get the camera working. Thanks for reading!