Build Season Day 4: Things are looking good

So far everything has been going very smoothly this season. We have had parents bringing very delicious meals to the team, which we are very grateful for. One of our sponsors, Solarcraft, is going to be building us a real version of the pyramid. (Once it's together, it will be available to all other teams to use at our school.) We can't thank them enough for being so generous.

We've also been given permission to host the Houston area scrimmage in our school's practice gym, so mark your calendar for the last weekend of build season. We should be able to have it February 16th, 17th, and 18th since we don't have school on that Monday for President's day. We would appreciate it if any local teams that have wooden versions of the goals bring them so we can have a full field.

As for the robot, the design is progressing extremely fast, possibly a bit too fast. We've identified a few problems with the design but we also keep finding solutions. We didn't have any new shooter prototypes today; we are waiting for the smaller dune buggy wheels for that. We did make several versions of our collector and we think we are narrowing in on a workable solution. Tomorrow we should have a working prototype collector/indexer system that we can mount to the shooter and test together.

We did a lot of geometry today as well. Our shooter heights and angles are all looking promising for very accurate shooting. The packaging problem is still an issue. We're planning for under-bumper collection of the discs so our collection/indexing system has to fit between our wheel wells. This is a hard challenge with the new dimensions but the smaller buggy wheels should help.

Our climbing/lift system has had some improvements. The new plan involves a 2 stage continuous lift. We're hoping we can get a 30 point climb out of this but this is a reach. We're very confident in the 20 point climb, though.

Size and weight are big concerns. Hopefully we will start getting things CADed and we can get a solid weight approximation soon.

- Spectrum

“Don't tell me the sky's the limit when there are footprints on the moon.” - Paul Brandt