The majority of the poly carbonate was cut on Friday, so the day started off good. The CDS and Intake assembly began. The intake is almost finished, the hard stops need to be added and it will be done. The CDS vertical rollers got assembled completely and mounted to the second robot. The rest of the shooter is missing a few churro stand offs that just got finished as we were leaving. Then it will be mounted to the robot. The variable hood shooter is almost ready for assembly just missing a few 3D printed pieces. On Sunday the CDS will get mounted to the robot and we will probably spend most of the day wiring everything together.

The climber ran for the first time today, well it lifted the robot for the first time today. We tested it on Thursday(or Wednesday) but it didn’t have enough torque to lift the robot. So we added a 4:1 versa planetary gearbox as an additional reduction. We practiced a climb sequence with the operator, its looking pretty quick, probably around 12 seconds to get aligned, and climb. The actual climb only takes around 6 seconds.

With the climber finally functioning that brings our robot up to our minimal ranked priority list for our first event. The next items on the list is improving accuracy of the shooter and adding a traversal climb.

Programming had the robot for the whole meeting today. We changed the shooter to use majority feed forward and we are much more consistent. We took some slow motion footage of the shooter today to try and figure out why we are missing around 1/3rd of our shots. It looks like the transition between the stopper wheel and the shooter wheel is too aggressive and the cargo bounces around a lot. The cargo then misses some of the hood wrap and doesn’t go as far forward.

Annie came to the shop today again, she had a ton of fun and kept the students entertained for the morning! She also matches the floor pretty well.

The 125 inspired climb is coming along at a decent pace. I don’t think we will have it ready before the Austin event in two weeks. It should make it on the robot by Amarillo event week five. The pull up climb is mostly ready/figured out. The weight shift hook is looking pretty decent. There is some uncertainty on the final geometry of the last hook that we are still figuring out. We will probably have the first version not flip out just to test the geometry.

The scouting sub team was testing out the FIRES Scouting web application today. I think they have decided on using that for scouting. They trained the whole scouting sub team on how to use it today. They also managed to train a few random students who will be scouting. Waco and Dripping Springs events were today, I was super excited to see team 2881 The Lady Cans do so well at Waco.