Today was not the best day ever. After working really hard the past three days and having a ton of success picking up balls and shooting them, we finally started to tackle our other issues. Those being: bringing down the bridge (so we can drive over it) and changing the wheels (so we can drive over the bump). The problem is that these issues are not as easily fixed. We also fixed some programming issues, worked on the mascot some more, and finished up getting ready for the Ice Fishing Tournament fundraiser.
Before we started working on the robot again, the team got together and had a meeting. During the meeting, we discussed some important upcoming dates. The dates included the ice fishing tournament, a team movie showing (Real Steel), the last day of build season, the Duluth regional visit, and the U of M Regional. We also discussed a media release form and, in general, how the team is doing. Good times and lots of laughs also occurred.
After that, we moved down to the robot room to start working. Our first task was the completely take apart the bot. This was necessary to fix our wheel situation. Initially, we just threw the kit wheels on but they have a 3" radius. The bump in the middle of the field is 4". This will not work. Our plan is to put 4" radius wheels on stilts and then have two of the 3" radius wheels at the very front of the robot. The small wheels will help the big wheels get a little bit off the ground and then the big wheels will push the rest of the way (that's the plan anyway.........). The mental fatigue of build season definitely showed. Bydlon and Bryce took off and put on the big wheels about 6 times because they kept forgetting to do something or how something would change. For example, the wheels got put on but then they had to make a new hole for the smaller wheels. Then they put the frame pieces on backwards. Then the frame was too low so that had to fixed. We think we finally have a plan that will work which will get done tomorrow.
Ryan and Brandon worked hard on getting an arm mechanism working for pushing down the bridge. We have called them "tusks" in the past but the new mechanism looks remarkably like the minibot arm deployer from last year. It's an arm that swings down with an angle on the front to slide the bridge down. We will test it tomorrow.
Colin and Megan worked their tails off fixing programming issues. We are learning as we go and the new thing we learned today was how to program in a spike relay so we can make a motor got forward and backward. Awesome work by them.
Jesse and Gabe worked on the mascot some more. They finally an upper body piece that seems to work. Jenna worked on sending out emails to the PMMC and arranging the Ice Fishing Tournament. She also started editing the video for student profiles on the website. Sertoma Club in Alexandria puts on an Ice Fishing Tournament every winter. This year, they asked us to sell pizzas during the tournament. We are working with Dominos on this fundraiser. We get some of the profit for selling the pizzas. It is a really good opportunity for us to make some money and to get some more community exposure.
Tomorrow will be better after a good nights sleep.
As far as robot progress, we finished the new electrical board. It looks great and really saves space and weight. Bryce, Bydlon, Tyler, and many other students worked on this project. Bryce worked on Sunday for a couple hours cleaning up the wiring so it looks good and is efficient. The other project holding up driving was the chains on our wheels which we finished as well. Thanks to Zach from last year, we finally found a place to buy Lexan. Ryan and Brandon started making the final shooter and conveyer out of the plexiglass. We are joking that we are going to be called the "ghost robot" because our bot is basically going to be lexan with some aluminum braces.
Jenna continued editing team member profiles which will be done very soon.
First off, there are a couple visual changes to the blog. You probably noticed the new header visual (thanks Jenna). We will also be adding the Team Members page and a page describing our team and the mission of FIRST in the coming week or so. So look out for those.
The major project we worked on though was the wheel system. On Friday, we took the whole bot apart and started changing the wheels. We had to drop our wheels down so that the frame could fit over the bump. This is a much bigger task than it sounds. It requires cutting and drilling new axle holes in 12 pieces of extrusion. Then we had to put new chains on each gearbox and make new spacers for each wheel. This is a LONG process that we spent literally 9 hours on Saturday working on. Bryce's dad came and helped get the chains and spacers ready which was really nice. So we were feeling really good after getting the entire robot back together and the wheels on and working. Until... we tested it. There is a YouTube video up of the test. We were all so tired that you can't really tell how disappointing it was. However, the team is resilient and will think of another mechanism to go over the bump. No worries. 
Colin and Megan worked on getting the image processing for the camera going. The LabView programming has the power to recognize shapes and colors including the metal rectangles behind the hoops. This will allow us to program the robot to find the hoops and aim for us. 
As usual after such an awesome and amazing couple of days where we accomplished SO MUCH, today was a little bit of a thinking and figuring out what to do next sort of day. That doesn't mean we did not accomplish anything, just means we were a little more sluggish and a little less focused. The big accomplishment for today was that we made an angle adjuster mechanism for the shooter. We also continued work on the mascot.
When playing the game at the competition, we want to be able to shoot from different places on the field. To facilitate this, we wanted to adjust the angle of the shooter so we could shoot lower or higher depending on where we are and our battery life and many other factors. This post is titled this way because we ended up using one of the big components from last year: a lead screw and window motor. Last year, two lead screws and two window motors powered our scissor lift. This year, they are powering our angle adjuster. Tyler, Brandon, Bydlon, and Bryce worked on this mechanism. It works great. Colin almost finished the programming for it but had to leave. This will be totally operational tomorrow.
Steph, Jesse, and Gabe kept working on the mascot. They finished the head yesterday and have moved on to the body. Making the dimensions right is a hard task. There are no measurements in what we found online about the mascot so they are basically guessing and checking as they go. This makes work slow. They are plowing ahead though.