Sunday, January 16. 2011
I’m going through Blog writing withdrawal, so I’m hijacking the blog tonight!
We had a lot of flow in and flow out of students and mentors today, every time I turned around, it seemed like there were new students or mentors working on things. Working. A very operative word. There doesn’t seem to be much wasting of time being done by the students.
There were donut holes Munchkins in the morning, and lunch was Chicken Salad and Egg Salad that was provided by Ethan’s family. The chicken salad was delicious with apples and raisins and celery and a choice of nuts or no nuts!
The Mechanical team spent the morning working on the manipulator. They’ve tweaked the design to have 4 sets of two wheels, 4 inches apart with two motors instead of the 4 servos. Brianna worked the rest of the day on modeling the manipulator. Jake was working on putting the arm design, modeling the a-frame support structure and the telescoping arm. Both students had lots of input from other students and mentors throughout the day.
Our special guest in the early afternoon was Mentor Karen with baby Eamon. Mentor Cynette made him cry – oh wait, that was gas; Team Mom Sharon had much better luck as did Rachel and Crystal. Mentor Karen helped the electrical team find a power supply and left with the advice that they do not blow up the motor.
The sawdust was flying again for the Field team as they built a scoring grid. Wow! That’s two major pieces in two days!
Mentor from a bunch of other Rochester FIRST teams Rob (Hi Rob!) stopped to get some programming advice and then stayed and gave math and mechanical assistance to the mechanical subteam.
The drive train group started the planning for the bumpers and cut the plywood for two of the sides (need to buy more for the other two). They also started manufacturing the angle brackets. Matt M. spent substantial time working on the the inventor design of the drive train.
Alex C. worked on using LabVIEW to program the dashboard, while Mike H. and Gabe worked on MACH 1511’s drive train.
The controls group seemed to be in joy stick mania for a while, and Alumni Collin brought in a very cool (and expensive) set for the controls team to drool over.
The WEB team spent several hours working on formatting and matching styles throughout the web site. They have designed a new Blog button for the Rolling Thunder Blog of Awesomeness, but it isn’t installed yet.
Mentor Leann took some time to add up logged build season hours for the first week. 36 students logged in 771.5 hours and 19 Mentors logged in 483 hours.
Dinner was an amazing Pasta Bar with three types of pasta and tree sauces to choose from! Salad, bread and butter and cookies were also available. Thanks Ciana’s family! After dinner, there was a strategy meeting and that subteam came back full of energy.
Things seem to be winding down now. There is no school tomorrow because of Martin Luther King Day. So we will pick it up on Tuesday!
