Hello again! We’ve had a busy week as crunch time begins to set in, but we’re really starting to see results. With our next competition just a few short weeks away, we’re working faster than ever to make sure we can meet our deadlines, both for robot building milestones and award submissions.
The Build Team finished securing the Cargo Cannon to the robot, finished wiring the motors, and have nearly completed the Climbing Rig. Although time and material constraints have prevented us from making a full traversal system, we’re confident that a working climb arm, combined with the power and adaptability of the Cargo Cannon, will be more than enough to keep us effective in competitions. In any case, we expect the robot to be fully completed and ready for practice by the twenty-third of this month. This plan should put us in a good position to train our drivers, iron out any issues in the code, and be ready to run at full capacity when competition day comes around.
Meanwhile, the Programming Team has successfully tested the Cargo Cannon (I’m told we nearly caused permanent damage to a door), and has nearly finished reprogramming the servos to allow us to control the speed and impact of the projectiles! Other than that, we’ve finally managed to get the cameras working, giving us a substantial advantage when piloting the robot. This will be particularly helpful for picking up the Cargo Balls, since they likely won’t be spaced evenly throughout the field, and eyeballing the delicate process of lifting them will be much more difficult when observing from a long distance. Our next major goal is going to be ironing out the movement, and then later solidifying the code for the autonomous section of the competition.
Lastly, the Business Team submitted the written portion of the Chairman’s Award, finished the bulk of the executive summaries, and have spent the rest of their time on their submission for the Chairman’s Video. Although this has also meant there’s been a lot less time to post on the blog, we’ve also been able to finish most of our major tasks for the season, so with any luck, we should be able to provide much more regular updates in the near future.
And that’s a wrap for this week! Thank you all for your patience with our updates, and we hope you’re well. Stay tuned!
