February 3rd, 2017

Since the last blog post each team has completed a bit of progress.

The build team is working of shortening the chassis to be able to contain fit in the FRC robot dimension requirements. They are also working on adding the bumper soon, after sewing on the fabric. Additionally, the "French Fry Scoop" wood model has been finished, and they have finalized the design.

The electrical team, however, has completed very little progress as they are waiting for the build to finish working on the chassis. After the finishing the chassis, the electrical team plans on troubleshooting some problems and condensing the wires.

The programming is doing its thing writing some codes, like for a script for the joystick!

January 31st, 2017

As seen in the previous post, we have gotten started on our bumper and hopefully get started on the sewing of the red and blue fabric. We are getting back in the hang of things, working hard to finish our robot after finals week and the start of the new semester. So far, we are working on the getting the gears to work to be able to climb up the rope and we've finished making the part that will pull up the gears (see photo below). Good progress during week 5!

Today we have made the pool noodles! Now we are working on gear ratio and getting the sheet metal by tomorrow!

January 23rd 2017

As our semester 1 is coming to an end, less and less people are coming to meetings because of tests and exams. While we wait for supplies to arrive to start building, our team is hard at work making field components such as the davit, and the gear hopper. Our programming team is starting to learn about the different electric components we will be using, such as a shaft encoder and Pixycam. Our robot's design seems to have been finalized and people are making wood mock-ups that may be used in the actual robot's final construction. We have changed the length and width of our chassis to 28 inches x 27.5 inches to make sure we aren't over our restrictions of 32 inches x 30 inches.

- Tyler Gordon

January 20th, 2017

This week was a pretty successful and productive couple of days, as we were able to get started and finish the physical designing of prototypes and other parts. At the end of the previous week, we finalized which designs/robots we will be building this season. At the end of this week we were able to finish our dump truck cardboard prototype, the blueprint drawings, and the measurements. Many of us are focusing our attention towards helping out the design team, as it is what will get us up and running. We’ve also started building the peg mechanism to test out the gear part. Hopefully, we will finish building the peg within the next week to start testing and troubleshooting. Additionally, we are tweaking the dump truck to overcome a few problems in loading the fuel. Our goals for the next week, are to perfect our designs to overcome any possible problems by testing and researching. Also, since we have finalized our measurements, we hope to order any or all parts by the end of the next week. If all these goals are reached, we can hopefully start building, programming, and get started on the more exciting tasks!

- Carol, General Manager

January 18, 2017

Everyone is working really hard! Many of us this week have now begun to build cardboard prototypes of the field elements and our robot. The team has been working on the peg lift for gears, the gear loader (a.k.a. "french fry box"), a box to dump our balls into the low boiler, and a loader! 

No pictures today but will be some this week!

January 16th 2017 - Cardboard day

Today team 6408 talked about mocking all our mechanisms and the game field with cardboard and paper. We got started on all pieces and also got our custom rope done. The rope consists of 3 strands of braided 550 Para-cord. The rope is around 6 and a half feet long, but before the braid it was 9 feet. Our lift design, dump truck idea, and also gear placer design are in the process of being prototyped. Programming students have moved onto designing because we have nothing to program at the moment. Our parts list is coming along and we plan on having 2 cameras to switch between front and back views for driving. Since there are many layers of poly-carbonate sheets so vision should be limited, especially when there is a huge airship in the way.

First day of week 2 is coming along pretty well!

- Tyler, Lead Programmer