Day 42: The last push

Today was the first of 4 straight 12+ hour days for us. Our school's schedule works out very well and we always have a 4 day weekend for presidents day.

We spent most of today wiring; we won't know for sure if this is our best robot till it plays some matches but we can already tell that this is our prettiest robot. Lots of little details are getting hammered out, not many major changes, though we did change the location of our solenoid mounts.

We are moving to VEXpro traction wheels with rough top tread along with our omniwheels in our Butterfly drive. We tried the new Versawheel DTs but sometimes you shouldn't mess with what works. The 2" wide traction wheels have far more traction than the versawheels, it's not even close. When combined with our 8 motor drive train the acceleration in low gear makes it look like our robot is going to take off. We'll be adding some ramping functions so the drivers can keep the front wheels on the ground. The traction wheels are actually about 4.25" diameter once we mounted the tread on which caused some issues in our wheel wells so we had to turn down all of our standoffs to 7/16" instead of 1/2".

We had Discobots in the house tonight and they'll be working at our place all weekend. We'll also have at least a few more teams over for the Houston practice session. We don't have much of a field this year, but this game is sort of like soccer: all you need is some carpet and a ball and we should be able to practice.

- Spectrum

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then when you know better, do better.” - Maya Angelou