Starting Over Is Hard To Do

The team decided to make a new robot for a myriad of reasons. Those reasons being:

• We need something to show at the Discovery Student Showcase on March 15. 
• We wanted more practice building and wanted to use pneumatics.
• We like being around each other and any excuse for that to happen will do. 

So we decided to build a soccer ball kicking robot inspired from the game in 2010 where the robots had to kick a soccer ball into a goal. We have been working on Beckham (our name for the soccer bot) ever since the build season ended. However, the motivation and speed is not as high as it is during build season which is ok. Much more relaxed work. 

We decided to put the Mecanum wheels on Beckham. The main reason? They're awesome because they can strafe as well as turn in place and go forward and back. They are a pain in the butt though. They require the old gear boxes which have a ton of small parts that we had to find. The chains and spacers are also more difficult. Worth the effort though!

Bryce and a few others put together the electrical board. It looks great! The accessibility of the board is AWESOME! No pieces of metal in the way, no wires all over the place, no hunched over with a flashlight. It's really nice. Also, it's totally done! We should be able to drive tomorrow.

We decided to use pneumatics on the robot which is an interesting process. Quite a bit more to consider when using them like stroke length, size of pistons, and placement of other needed materials. Our concept came from watching a bunch of YouTube videos of 2010 robots who used pistons to kick the ball. Ryan designed and made a pretty sweet piston kicker that swung on a pivot kind of like when you push on the back of a swing. It looked great. Problem was that the piston was too slow. We needed more speed. Bryce decided to make a slider type of kicker which we are currently working on. 

The big event today was a parent meeting. Bydlon talked about the trip to the U of M for 10,000 Lakes Regional. That included itinerary, transportation, and hotel information. Parent permission forms were filled out and trip costs were collected.