This is a tough blog to write. First has come out today to suspend all remaining events, and cancel both world championships. For First’s entire response please see https://www.firstinspires.org/covid-19. I agree 100% with First’s decision on this matter its important as a society that we take the actions needed to attempt to lessen the crisis.…

The air leak was successfully fixed today and we held 80 psi for five minutes. Good enough for our needs! The air tanks got new mounts put on, and the neo that powers the conveyor got a new planetary gearbox for a total reduction of 6:1 now. This has significantly lowered the chances of the…

The team started today’s meeting with a debrief of Del Rio. We create a simple list of good and bad things that happened at the event. These don’t have to be robot related and we encourage everyone to join the discussion. Overall Del Rio seems to have been a positive and enjoyable experience for the…

Friday The trailer and load in team left Austin at 9 am, other groups of students and mentors left during the next four hours. Our load in team arrived hilariously early, but they got to be the first ones in line. My car left around noon, and we arrived 20 minutes before the pits were…

The team departs for our first event, Del Rio District Event, tomorrow. The trailer is leaving at 9 am. We had to pack the pit carts, the then load everything in the trailer. Well almost everything, we left out the robot, robot cart, and battery cart because the programming team was on a mission. We’ll…

Everything fell into place at the start of the meeting, the poly belt on the hopper was cut shorter, the drive base wires were rerouted to make room for the hopper. An additional stage was added to the hopper planetary gear boxes. We changed out the poly belt on the conveyor to timing belts, but…

We set out to resolve the issues with the elevator hook deploying today. The bar was moved further out about an inch past where the current hook was at the start. The bar on the field is ~.63″ from the box tube support in the middle. So we should be able to climb in the…

Today was an optional meeting, we have four days until Del Rio and have so much stuff left to do. The robot got a look over today, looking for any problems that need to be fixed before Del Rio. The list of stuff to do on the white board grows longer. A faulty Neo encoder…

Today was the day that we as a team have been waiting for. Its the day where all the pieces were dropped into place and everything came together on the robot. Here’s what the robot looked like at about 4 PM on Saturday. We tested the intergration between the hopper, conveyor, and shooter for the…