We had our first on time recap meeting today, we went over what we accomplished last week, before starting on anything this week. Wild! Progress, small but progress.

Tomorrow. Tomorrow is the day the MDF bot moves around and tries to play Rapid React for the first time. We fixed some of the problems today, found two more to resolve a bit more on that later. I know I’ve said tomorrow or the next meeting is the day the MDF bot moves but we are very close now. I imagine programming will have some issues when we try to run it all at once. So maybe Thursday for some game playing? But there is a problem with that, freezing rain for Thursday. I’m pretty sure school will get canceled and our meeting too.

Manufacturing

Some students continued assembly on the electronics panel. Its a double tier panel with 12 spark maxes, roborio, vrm, and a radio. The idea is that it can be plugged into any robot chassis we have and drive all the mechanism on it.

The MDF bot had the problem with being 2″ taller than it should be, and the compression between the hand off wheel was completely missing. We didn’t fix it the right way, that was determined to be a bit too much work for the moment. Instead we made a poly carbonate ramp to raise the cargo and create compression between the cargo and the wheel. In addition we had to extend the CDS rollers to be higher to make compression with the cargo over the ramp.

The hood for the shooter and wheel got assembled today. We accidentally put the shooter on a little backwards so we’ll have to fix that tomorrow. There is also a little bit of a dead zone with the belts, they need to be moved more to the center to increase the compression. Shouldn’t take too much of tomorrow to fix both issues. Then all we have to do is mount the electronics panel and get some code on it.

CAD

The CDS is getting closer to becoming a thing. I’m thinking we wont hit the deadline of having CAD complete by end of day on Saturday. We’ll be close but I don’t think we’ll be done. The shooter doesn’t really exist at all in the final CAD yet. The CDS mounting needs some work, as it doesn’t look too great at the moment but the main plate is done, the rest should come together quickly hopefully. Still behind, but hopefully we’ll manage to get to a point where we stop falling more behind.

CAD finished releasing the climber to manufacturing today, so work will start on making all of the parts tomorrow. Its mostly CNC plates so not too much for the students. Design review on intake first thing tomorrow.

Random Mentor Thought

Maybe this is becoming a regular thing, we’ll see. I read this post after Saturdays meeting and could relate a lot. Some of the newer members on our team like to do the easy work at the moment, they like to be told what to do. That’s perfectly fine as they don’t know enough yet to tackle the big projects on their own. I’m hoping it will be less of a problem next year. On Saturday I got one of our returning students to lead a group of new students on assembling the gear boxes, so we are taking steps to transform students. Sometimes the bottleneck during meetings is not having enough mentors to lead all of our students.