Day 36: Finally Driving

We had a bit of a scare this week. Our main manufacturing sponsor called on Wednesday afternoon to inform us that they weren't going to be able to do the main laser run of the season because their laser cutter went down and likely wouldn't be fixed until next week. This left us scrambling a bit. Amazingly all the people we told about this problem were very generous, offering to help make parts for us or even in the case of Dallas Jesuit (FRC#2848) offering to send us an entire spare sheet metal chassis in case we couldn't get ours cut in time. We are so thankful to have so many awesome friends in the FRC community. After a few phone calls on Wednesday we were able to secure STAR Precision Manufacturing here in Houston to do a quick laser run for us and still have Solarcraft our main sponsor bend the parts. We also were able to cut some of the parts we needed on our CNC router.

We just got all the parts back this morning. We were able to get the practice robot up and driving and should have the real chassis ready for powder coat on Monday morning. Tomorrow we will mount the intake on the robot and should be able to test the most important two functions of the robot Drive Train and Intake. We still have a few more things we are missing and will get made once our sponsor has their machine running again.

We are missing the intake from the front of the robot, so the weight distribution is very bad in these late night tests. Our defense crossing will improve.

This morning we also continued our monthly food distribution here at our school, we have partnered with several other organizations at the school to host a mobile food pantry on the 2nd Saturday of every month. Over 150 families get much needed food from this pantry.

- Spectrum

“Be leaders, not because you must, but because you’re willing.” - St. Paul of Tarsus