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 slice of carpet and a sheet. All set and prepped for the big reveal. We must have done a good job preparing things the day before and during the day of, because there wasn’t much we had to setup. All of the preparation was worth it as the reveal went well! We had around 15 sets of parents.

It’s been 60 days since the start of the season and so far our students have spent collectively 3,960 hours in the lab. We’ve made 775 commits to github, adding 46,700 lines of code removing 3500. We have 51 3D printed parts on the robot, 71 manually machined parts and 46 CNC machined parts on the robot. 43 wheels and 13 motors to spin them all. 8 sensors on the robot. We’ve taken 17,220 photos since the beginning of the year, all these things help make up the 95lb robot. I’m proud to introduce to the world our team’s 15th robot Cannoli!

We quickly packed our stuff our of the gym and returned to the shop were we had two students driving both robots around the field. I’m impressed they didn’t run into each other at all! Its times like this I love having the fully enclosed field. You don’t have to worry about anyone getting a little too close with a robot.

While the open house was winding down we started working on autonomous modes again. In no time we managed to get the very basic one down. Shooting our preload into the upper hub and driving out of the tarmac zone. Easy 6 points! Next they are working on getting another cargo before shooting into the hub.

While we had both robots on the field today we noticed the second robot’s intake doesn’t perform as well as the first robots. We looked and looked and didn’t end up finding any real reason for the difference. The top roller sits about 1/8″ further away on the second robot and that small difference is enough to ruin the intake’s performance. There wasn’t an obvious reason to where this difference is coming from. We decided to remake the plate moving the first roller 1/4″ inch closer on an arc. This should hopefully fix the problem and even should make the intake a little more responsive on the competition bot.

We have a list of things that we need to fix before our first competition

• Bumper mounts replaced/fixed
• New bumper springs made
• Make spare bumper parts
• Cut CDS baseplate so we can put in bumper pins
• Reprint bumper mounting blocks so the heat set inserts are better aligned
• Try the fixed intake version
• Do an inspection

Its not a large list, and it should be pretty quick to knock most of the items off the list. Just got to get a little time with the robot that’s not being consumed by driver practice out autonomous practice.