This was the end of our second week after completing fall training. The students are all broken out into different departments and the team is starting to make progress. The shop is still a mess but we are working on fixing it!(One of the unmentioned problem of acquiring new tools, you have to find a place to put them.) We’ve gotten the storage closet into a semi clean state.

We are once again trying to make a push to track our tasks using Kan Ban within Trello. CAD has pushed out the first set of parts to make for their off season project. This has filled up the board nicely. CAD is working on improvements to our drive base. We are adding multiple mounting positions for the gear box, and improving bumper mounts.

The gearbox also got a redesign. We’ve dropped down from 3 Neos to 2 Neos. The Neos are now mounted over the drive rail to save space inside the belly pan. A 3D printed cover has also been added to prevent anything from becoming crunchy bits between the gears.

Progress is being made on all fronts, programming is busy learning how things work, manufacturing has started learning the different machines in the shop, and business is getting their projects started. I’ve been searching for a bunch of different inspiration for projects to try and ways to improve how we build our robot. One thing we are going to do better this year is our electronics placement. In 2020 they got shoved into an inaccessible place and it was a pain to deal with.

There are four weeks left before winter break. I feel behind and the build season hasn’t even started yet. That’s probably not great. Some of it comes because this is a rebuild year. There are more new students on the team than returning members. There will be things that won’t get taught in time and we’ll end up doing it for the first time during the build season, but it should all hopefully work out.