Breakaway Day 27 – 19 Days to Go! It’s Alive!

What we had for Dinner!  We had roast chicken!!! It was served with Caesar salad, garlic toast, baby carrots and dip.  And for dessert, Klondike Bars and M-n-M Bars. Dinner was provided by Alexis’s family!  Delicious!Thursday!  Time for the safety talk!  Tonight’s topic was a refresher on the issue of horseplay and the reminder to keep your hands to yourself.  It seems strange that we have to reinforce this concept with High Schoolers, but at this point of the season, everyone has spent so much time with each other that, well, we become more easily annoyed with one another and sometimes self-control isn’t quite as good as it needs to be.

Integration Meeting Notes! (Thanks, Val!)

Electrical – They moved the board so it’s opposite the cRIO.The battery holder has been designed and sent out to be made, and they are shopping for Lexan and a few other items.

Mechanical (kicker) – Detailed drawings are about half submitted. They need to refine the design on the kicker, ball-magnet and the beater-bar, which is now called the “thrasher.” The bar to keep the ball from going more than 3″ inside the frame needs work.  in order to figure out mounting points for Lexan panels to cover the robot, they need to finish the structural design. Will need thicker Lexan than last year to be more protective.

Mechanical (hanger) – They have finished drawings, will send tonight. They need a 10-turn potentiometer for the winch.

Drive-train – Getting wheels attached to motors seems to be a slow process. The plywood is cut for the front bumpers.  To do: design bumper mounts!

Programming – They have finished high-level autonomous mode. Low-level autonomous needs about two days to finish. Mock electrical board is on the drive-train.They need to test tele-operated mode and see if robot goes over the bump under its own power. The CAN now…can! Kicker code is close to done.

Field – The field should be done this weekend. A Ball return is done, the foam is in spandex. They need to coordinate with Programming for control coding for the field system.

All around the shops…

The electrical sub-team completed sizing up the Lexan they needed and were seen shopping for potentiometers that they may potentially purchase.  They wanted to spend big bucks, but in the end decided that they would hold off and see if the ones they had would work okay.

Matthieu was working on writing a press release for the Rochester Rally on Feb 21.  In addition to his technical sub-team, is is on the corporate sub-team which prepares our press releases and other media interfaces.

The raw materials that were ordered on Tuesday have arrived!  The drive-team was sorting, inventorying and labeling the pieces. Team Leader Larry weighed one of the larger pieces which is the foot of the kicker.  11 pounds. Yeah! What’s the limit this year?  120 pounds.  Hmmm.  After the inventory was completed, they started to work on the bumpers.  Read the rules first!

News Flash!  The first student to get a 100% on the games test…drum-roll, please…Shauna!  Followed seconds later by Becca and a little later in the evening by Peter. Congratulations!

The controls group was soldering switches for the control box, crimping and heat shrinking the ribbon cables to the crimp connectors and cutting the perf (perforated) board.  Mentor Eric A. was teaching electrical safety by demonstrating the hazards of not limiting the current applied to LEDs. Just so you know, the green ones change color and pop and smoke.  The students were impressed and asked for an encore performance.

Alexis of the Flare group did some planning for our team recognition awards, while Quentin took some time to work on the t-shirt design.

At 8:10 pm a loud cry came from the alcove where the programming team was working!  The robot went over the bump, driven with the joysticks and the code!  It’s ALIVE! The event was not repeatable, however as one of the speed controllers stopped working. They got it to drive over the bump a second time, but not without adjusting its direction manually.

After things settled down, the field team reported that they were purchasing over $100 of Velcro for the field and that was only one side of the Velcro!  They also fixed the crate to get it ready for this year’s shipping of the robot.

Alex C. gave a report of his status on writing programming for the dash board of the classmate.  It sounded like it was going well.

Larry visited with the mechanical detailing and designers working in Inventor gave this status:  The Mech team is CRUISING!  Larry is happy!