Wow, uh missed a few posts here, I’ve spent more time in the lab than sleeping since Sunday. The team is definitely feeling the crunch trying to get the traversal climber working. Sunday and Monday were filled with trouble shooting. We tested found a problem, thought of a solution, tested, and repeated the cycle multiple…

It was a busy day with some ups, and some big downs. The day started off with a visit from the shop dog Annie. She keeps the business students company every Saturday morning until about lunch these days. Annie provides a nice relief for the students and it tires her out which is a win…

The agenda for the time between Austin and Amarillo consists of auto, traversal, and back spin reduction. Tonight we are progressing on all three fronts. The main robot has spent most of the night running auto routines. The second robot is doing testing with the PTFE hood backing to see how much it affects the…

The CAD students worked out the remaining questions on the traversal climber today. So far we have one or two outstanding items. We have managed to get the first version of parts out to manufacturing and we are working on solving the last remaining problems with a different hook setup. Our traversal climb is inspired…

Today was our team debrief from the Austin District Event. We sat the team down and talked as group about things that went well and things that didn’t go well. The list got a very messy, we’ll add that under the bad category and do a bit better next time. I also might suggest we…

Load In The team arrived at load in around 4pm, the weather had a small chance of rain, but thankfully it didn’t. The trailer was unloaded pretty quickly when we hit a small snag, we lost all the bolts for a wheel on one of our tool boxes. The bolts had backed out in the…

I don’t even remember what day it is at this point, we’ve been in the lab every day for the past week. Looking at the calendar tells me we have one more meeting before we load in at Austin. In the mean time the 3D printers are printing spares, the router will soon be cutting…

Its a Sunday today and the start of spring break was on Friday so attendance is doubly light. We had a few students in working on code, the competition branch is getting more usable. Issues were put up to fix incorrect current limiting on the drive base, incorrect setting open loop ramp rate on all…

Today we used the morning and a bit of afternoon to perform a few upgrades on the competition bot. The CDS base plate got notches cut into it so we can put the bumper pins on the front in. The sponsor panel/shooter support rod was mounted to the robot. We put the intake wheel spacers…

Today was our first open house in years. We started the day off with some last minute preparations so the open house would run smoothly. The pit carts were moved to the foyer, robots were set out on display. The competition robot was moved to the gym. We had a PA system, projector, a little…