Today felt like the opposite of yesterday, progress was being made through out the entire meeting. At the start of the meeting I talked with the manufacturing student lead to set the priority for the rest of the meeting. The number one priority right now for manufacturing is finishing the parts required for the intake. Its the subsystem that is the closest to being done and requires the least amount of other stuff on the robot to test. With that manufacturing set off to work to produce the required parts. I created a Trello card to assemble the intake and linked every part required to that card.

We have been using Trello for project management and part work flow this year. We’ve tried in the past two years, but this year it has reached critical mass. Students and mentors are using it to drive parts through the manufacturing workflow. We have some improvements that could be made, its all iterative after all!

There are 37 different cards in WIP/Todo for manufacturing. CAD managed to get all of the CDS and fixed hood shooter parts released tonight. So first version of CAD is complete Woho! Only 2 Weeks late, and we’ve trimmed scope. I’m not sure how teams get it done so quickly, I’m sure thatll be the topic of some discussion we have in the post season. CAD continued work on the belly/brain pan, and the battery mount. Both should be done soon.

We managed to carve out about 30 minutes tonight where one of the students got some drive practice on the MDF bot. The MDF bot has some flaws, like 12 extra inches of hex shaft sticking out on each side of the intake cause we didn’t want to cut it… The turning is a little scuffed cause the front two wheels arn’t powered, and its a little wobbly because MDF is quite heavy. We almost tipped over once. But we got some good practice in just gathering cargo and shooting from close up into the upper hub.