Hello everyone, it’s been another day of steady progress here at the Wire Clippers! On the build angle, we’ve been figuring out how to budget the rest of our grant money. Thus far, we’re in order for a 360-degree camera, a new controller for the drive team, several new motors, and a slew of nuts-and-bolts parts that you probably don’t want to hear about (if, for some reason, you do want to hear about how many bolts we bought, and at what length we bought them, feel free to leave a comment and we can probably get that to you). That aside, we finished mounting the battery holders to the new chassis, and are considering switching our drive train to neo motors. These motors, much like mecanum wheels last year, are the “hot new thing” (to quote one of our build team members) but seem to be much harder to use and program. Although the effectiveness is certainly appealing, we’re a bit hesitant to invest in them until we’ve worked our way through our current problems. Nonetheless, doing so in the future is a promising option, and purchasing them later this year is by no means off the table yet.
One of the old batteries, secure and comfortable in the new battery holder 
With a coalition effort from the build and programming team, we got half of the pistons working. The other half will (hopefully) be coming soon
On the programming team’s end, we spent the day trying to get last year’s robot’s pneumatic system up and running. Those of you who were reading last year might remember how the system worked: use two pistons to push the robot onto its back, lift the suspension bar, have the other two pistons lift the bot forward, lower the bar, and leave the robot suspended from a bar above it. Although its track record wasn’t perfect, this mechanism was more than capable of lifting the robot and keeping it hanging for minutes on end (no small feat considering the weight we were dealing with). This year, the mechanism is giving us a bit more trouble, but it should be back to work with a little bit of love (likely coupled with a lot of reprogramming). We hope to have the whole thing up and running soon, and will absolutely provide videos once we do!
After spending half of the season at home on a computer, it feels great to finally be making real progress on a real robot, not to mention being able to share our progress with all of you at home. Once again, thank you so much for reading; it’s support from people like all of you that makes this whole program possible. Unfortunately, we’re going to be off next week, since it’s spring break at our school, but rest assured, we’ll be back Monday the third, ready for action. See you then!
