Today was an optional meeting, allowing students some make up attendance if they need it. We only had 4 students show up today. We had two programmers and two manufacturing students. The two manufacturing students started finishing the remaining operations on the fixed tube of the climber. These parts didn’t fit in the Haas so they had to be flipped and there is a few operations on each side. So it took a while to get them done. Next the students started working on the1 x 1’s that hold up the entire CDS and shooter subsystem. Assembly progress is blocked on the CDS until we get those pieces done.

We noticed a clearance issue on the real robot today which is an oopsie. The “frog” plate as the students love calling it doesn’t fit on the drive rail because it hits the external encoder mount. It sucks cause we missed this in design review. It wasn’t had to fix, the part got a clearance added in CAD, then we made a small jig to hold it in the router and finally the clearance was cut out.

Me and another mentor spent some time organizing our growing belt collection. In 2020 I ordered every 10T(50mm) increment of HTD belts from 300mm – 750mm from https://www.vbeltguys.com/. The search takes a second to find the right belt you are looking for, but the prices blow everyone else out of the water. This year I ordered more of each belt and a lot of the ones we are using on the robot. So we had a chance to organize and label the belts nicely.

The programming students where testing out long range shooting on the MDF robot. We made a few tweaks to fix wrap issues in the hood. Now we keep hitting the ceiling. The ceiling is just too low in the lab to make it in the upper hub from 17 feet away. I foresee some time in a gym, or the cafeteria in our future. The programmers also got the limelight align working. They also got a lookup table figuring out what velocity the flywheel needs for the current distance.

Tuesday should be productive day, the parts for the climber should arrive on Monday, the final pieces to make for the climber was finished today, the intake only needs 1 set of shafts to be finished on Tuesday before assembly can begin. The remaining CDS parts are either shafts, or need to be cut on the router. Six weeks from kick off would be this upcoming Saturday, so if bag day existed it should be next week Tuesday the 22nd. A student was saying how much trouble we would be in if bag day was a thing this year. I think we might surprise him with how quickly the robot will come together this week.