Saturday Meeting 1/15

Saturday's meeting was an important one for us. In my 7 years involved with 340 I don't remember so much progress so early in the build season. Part of it might have to do with our experience from the 2007 game but things are progressing nicely.

The minibot group spent the day much like I assume JVN spends a typical day at IFI, playing with VEX. We got our prototype to climb the pole in 5.9 seconds which was well below our goal for the meeting of building anything close to legal that could climb the pole in ten seconds. Even though there were some illegal parts, (VEX Motors ETC) we are happy with the results and are really excited to have the next 5 weeks or so to tweak and perfect our designs so we can have a fast and reliable minibot. We think we have our "alignment" mechanism down and have some good ideas for minibot delivery.

The "lift" group had a good meeting with a really solid prototype that was built that I could easily see influencing the design that ends up on the robot. That gets me excited because the sooner we figure out the final mechanisms the more time for programmers and driver practice.

The "acquisition" group again played a lot with the tubes and some interesting prototypes were made. Lots of wooden grabbers wreaked some havoc on our red triangle, but nothing duct tape wouldn't fix.

The drivetrain is coming along nicely. Frame members were being cut to length and that welder should be fired up in no time.

Lunch was a delicious combination of hommade and delivery Pizza, with such a large team this year there were no leftovers for the late group to munch on so we wrapped up around 8. 12 hour days this early in the build season are fun, but 4 weeks from now hopefully we still have the gas to turn out a beautiful robot. Maybe next Saturday I'll make sure we're done at 5....

37 Days to ship!

-Justin