Well its done, week four is now done. We are really behind schedule. I’ve been worrying about the schedule and how we are going to get things done for about two weeks now, the students are starting to worry. We have one drive base done, another in pieces, the elevator has approximately 60% of the parts manufactured(for one robot), one shooter is 60% assembled. The hopper is about 50% done, the intake CAD should have all the unique parts made, it still needs to be added in the main assembly and put together. The elevator is still missing a gear box, and we need to get clever to make up some lost height on the hook. But its not all bad news, we’ve made great progress this last week, we just need to keep pushing and working towards our goal, so we can get practice in before Del Rio.

The practice bot drove for the first time today. We figured out why one side of the drive base was running slower than the other. It turns out one of the Neos on the slow side was only out putting 1/5th of the power than the rest. Strange, we replaced the Neo and both sides were the same speed.

The drive base is extremely light at the moment so it will slow down some once we add the rest of the robot.

We started designing the gearbox for the elevator today. We need a ~15:1 reduction and two Neos. This setup will give us plenty of breathing room, and if we eventually get partner climb figured out we shouldn’t need to change anything on the gearbox.