Going into the Houston District event our team had one major goal, secure enough district points to make it to District Championship. The estimated number of district points to safely reach District Champion ship in Texas is about 56 points. At our first event we ended with 21 points, so we needed to get 36…

Quick update from last night, we added an inline chain tensioner to the arm. This makes adjusting the tension of the chain super easy. Next we replaced the top sprocket on the chain stage that was looking pretty rough. The sprocket teeth started to look like shark fins. One of our through bore encoders that…

Today we tested the cube catapult after we got all of the pieces made. The results were interesting. The original idea wasn’t to launch the cube over the robot, but off the back side. But that didn’t have enough power. Over the robot didn’t work that well either, consistency issues and the cube goes too…

The chain conversion on the second stage of the arm finally got all the way put together. It was slow going because we had to resolve some clearance issues that were missed in CAD. Now there is a new problem with the gear box, it flexes a lot when powering the arm down. Watch the…

Over the past two days we’ve been working hard to get both robots up and running. The practice bot got its arm and intake attached. Tonight it’s arm ran for the first time. It took longer than desired to get everything working because we had to clean up messy wiring along the way. The practice…

Its been a bit of a slow week for the team, everyone is recovering from competition at Waco. That hasn’t stopped us from releasing the chain driven iteration of the arm’s second joint. The new chain powered arm has two idlers at the top so we can route the chain inside of the arm’s poly…

Today was the first meeting after the Waco district event, we have a routine that we do after every event. First we start with story time where the team shares funny, unique or surprising moments. Next we do a blameless postmortem where we talk about things that went well and things that went poorly. The…

Thursday Waco is only a short trip(less than 2 hours) from out shop in Austin. This allowed us to spend the morning in the shop making last minute adjustments to autonomous and arm control logic. There were two small problems that happened in the above video, they’ll happen again. The robot was loaded on the…

The team leaves tomorrow afternoon for Waco. That means tonight was hectic to say the least. The team was busy packing, fine tuning code, fixing the final remaining problems and finishing documents. We got 18 lbs of ballast added to the back of the robot, it isn’t that pretty but it was quick and it…