A Wild Robot Appeared!

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You know in Pokemon when you're walking through the field and a wild Pokemon shows up? Not a Rattata or that raccoon thing, those stink. Like a legendary Pokemon or something. Our robot kind of seemed to do that today. We worked hard but, all of a sudden, it rose up out of the ground and surprised us. Then we immediately fell in love with it (like the first time I saw Articuno). Plus, it kind of looks like Krabby (a pokemon).

We knew what we needed to do today:

• Get the electrical board all wired up
• Attach it and wire the motors 
• Mount the towers

It's crazy when a group of (awesome) people have objectives and know how to meet them and then just DO IT.

A group of team members tackled the electrical board first. As discussed yesterday, we used white board material for electrical board. We also mounted the Talons using velcro (lighter, easy change out) and zip ties to mount the PD (ditto). We messed up the PD wiring at first because we were working too fast. But we figured it out eventually.

Then our engineering mentor, Dan from Douglas Machine, showed up with some new fun parts for us. We riveted the electrical board to the drive train. Simultaneously, we mounted the towers and got those all wired up. One tower will house the information systems (DSC and cRio). The other tower will hold the pneumatics.

Finally, at the end of the night, we finished all the wiring and programming changes. We were able to pick up a ball and drive around a little.

Chairman's team started making outlines of the speech (at least talking out the major points). Programming is still working on vision processing so we can find the "hot goal" during Auto.

More testing and the hammer mounting starts tomorrow. Stay tuned for more videos this week as we test.