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 get to that in a second.

Today was the first time in 9 weeks that our team can say we have a finished robot. To start the meeting we had an unplanned robot reveal to our own team. We have the CAD team lead, and a programming student talk about the robot, it’s capabilities, and random cool facts. This was a fun moment for the team, everyone admiring the teams hard work over the last 9 weeks. It also provided all team members an opportunity to learn a bit more about our robot.

This year’s robot is the best looking robot the team has ever built. Tomorrow we get to find out how well it performs on the playing field. We managed to make some final tweaks before we started the meeting, crossing off everything left on the to do list. Manufacturing finished the part they got handed yesterday, the parts should work, they just need to be taken down to final size with some sand paper. These parts will be added to the elevator during load in day. The driver and operator got some practice in during the school day. The rest of the day we have one goal, autonomous modes.

It was a long but successful night. We left the lab at around 1:20 am. But we didn’t leave empty handed. Tonight we can say that we have four working autonomous modes. The most impressive is the five power cell auto. We start lined up with our trench and drive forward, shoot three power cells then turn 180, and grab two more power cells, turn 180 and shoot again. Shooting in auto has about a 80 – 90% success rate right now. The five power cell auto is worth 25 points if we make all the shots. Thats pretty good for a day, hopefully it will be enough to get a good lead in Del Rio.

The next auto we made was a simple move back from the starting line and shoot three power cells, then turn 180 so we are ready to bolt off at the end of auto. Another three power cell auto we added is starting lined up with the scoring zone, driving forward shooting the three power cells. The final auto we added is a simple move 3 feet off the line.

Tomorrow we all travel to Del Rio and get to see how the robot performs on the field. We have a few items to resolve once we get our pit setup and inspected. Right now we are not happy with the transition of power cells from the 2 moving rollers to the 3rd fixed roller. We also made a quick polycarb hood to keep power cells in, that isn’t great yet. We’ll see how things go down at Del Rio, but I imagine these will be pretty high up on the list of things to fix.