Working for Tomorrow

It's kind of hard to believe it's only the third official day of the build season. It feels like it was a loooong time ago that we learned what this season's game was (turns out it was just five days ago). As mentioned at the end of yesterday's post, the team is still experiencing growing pains. We are working hard to fix them however. The team set up an account at Menard's so it will be MUCH easier to access parts to keep building in the future. Thanks goes out to Connie Nelson, Mr. D., and Laurie Cook for setting that up for us. That was one of the major issues of today and last year. We had a lot of ideas but it was hard to get parts.

In general, most of the things we worked on today will be finished tomorrow. That makes today a little unsatisfying but tomorrow will be awesome. 

Tyler did a great job getting everything ready to start making the bump and bridge set up. Hopefully our account will be ready tomorrow and we will be able to get the materials. This will be very crucial once we start building our actual robot. Testing the robot driving over the bump and balancing on the bridge will be very important.

The build and electrical team worked on two separate projects. The first project was starting on a shooter prototype. The shooter we are envisioning will be a wheel spinning on a CIM motor. The ball will pass through an alley similar to the gatherer prototype we built yesterday. The wheel will be spinning at a high speed and push the ball out. Hopefully we will have video of it tomorrow. Brandon (picture 1) and Chandler worked hard on setting it up. Bryce worked on it a little more later on. Jimmy gave us a bunch of pointers which is awesome.

The other big project for the team today was getting a KitBot built so that the programming team has something to test on. A KitBot just means taking the materials given to us in the Kit of Parts and making a test robot out of it. It also helps us get a better visual clue on where our gatherer and shooter will go and how our bot will drive. Much easier to envision these things on an actual bot instead of in our heads. Bryce started by getting together the electrical board (picture 2). We are trying a new drive system this year, tank drive (picture 3). The only thing left on this project is mounting the motors (picture 4). Colin fought through illness to get the drive computer all set up (Go Colin!). Bryce, Spencer, Chandler, and Allen worked on the KitBot.

Tomorrow we have a lot of things to work on and will be able to get the materials for them too. A bunch of YouTube videos (hopefully) will be posted. Thanks for reading!