Thursday, February 18. 2010
Winter Break, Day 4!
Parentor Terri and I took the noon shift today. Several students were waiting for us at noon. I love the enthusiasm!
Mentor Tom C. joined us shortly later and got things hopping in the shop.
We ask the students to come after lunch or bring their own lunches, but today we brought back the leftover ziti from dinner last night, reheated it and had enough food for 10-15 people. It didn’t go to waste!
The big task for the day, other than finishing the robot (please) was moving the fully set up field from the cafeteria to the gym to get it ready for Rochester Rally!
Parentor Val was back in Rally Sign, sign, sign, sign… mode.
The Woodie Flowers Award essay was submitted by mid afternoon! Once again it was an ugly essay as the entry system took away all of the paragraph formatting.
What we had for Dinner! Today it was Kevin’s family’s turn to bring dinner. We had “make your own sandwiches” with several types of bread, rolls, meat assortments (turkey, ham, roast beef, bologna), cheese and veggies. It was supplemented with cheese pizza (and some leftover ziti) carrots and celery, pickles, apples , clementines, and brownies for dessert!
Thursday’s Safety Talk! Mike H. reviewed what could be found in our team Safety Manual and we did a review of this year’s incident reports and discussed root causes and corrective actions. Apparently Mike M has been completing incident reports on a regular basis. Not good.
Parentor Lee reported that the Democrat and Chronicle will be here on Sunday for the Rally, bringing a reporter and a photographer. Time Warner Cable was already scheduled to attend.
Oops! I almost forgot the Integration Meeting notes!
Electrical – board is going on the robot! Added terminals to new batteries. More limit switches have been obtained. Camera mount needs to be reworked.
Controls – sent in revised drawing for top joystick mount. Sliders appear to not work – may need to have a Plan B. Need to decide whether to ship the controls with the robot or not.
Mechanical kicker – mounted sensor for kicker, started on beater bar (will be on tonight). Need to figure out what will “skin” the robot.
Mechanical hanger – need to make collars for tubes, otherwise all set.
Field – field is being moved into gym. Will set it up on Friday for practice and Rally.
Drive-train – waiting on superstructure before making bumpers.
Programming – autonomous mode has been debugged.
Everyone – weight is the big issue. Trim anything unnecessary! Mechanical has been working on weight issues all day. Suggestion: replace Lexan with netting on the superstructure, except over the electrical board (sponsor stickers will go on that piece of Lexan). Put a small strip of thin Lexan around the top of the superstructure, so that Harris and PHS logos can be put on all four sides. An estimate of weight for this strategy must be created tonight, to compare to the weight of Lexan over the entire superstructure.
After dinner and meetings, the rest of the field was moved to the gym.
At exactly 8:08 pm, the welded superstructure arrived! A whole day early! And then about an hour and a half later, a weld on the superstructure broke while they were adjusting it. The welder was called and the part was rushed back to him!
I’ve been here too long today, so I’m signing off… (it’s a pun…)
(get it?)