Build Season Week 2

Week two has left us as quickly as it came, leaving us with only four more weeks to realize our ideas and make them reality. It’s been near non-stop motion in our classroom as we frantically rush (and trip over each other) to start conceptualizing the robot of the year.

Our programming team finished the drive code they plan to use on our old test robot, and are currently collaborating with the electrical team to make headway with sensor programming.

Electrical was hard at work calculating resistor needs for the optical sensor and wiring it up to the test robot. A sonic rangefinder, which helps judge the distance of objects from the robot using a form of echolocation, was also hooked up to the robot,

The vision group dabbled in a lot of miscellaneous prep work, but are now able to start fine tuning the vision processing system. Until the vision system decides to randomly malfunction, which it seems to like to do fairly often.

While they might not be involved in the robot, the marketing team is working just as hard as the rest of us. They worked hard to prep the canvas for the pit wall designs with an oil based primer, and they also worked hard to wash oil based primer out of hands, clothes, metal, and various other materials.

It was a learning experience.

Various other projects of theirs are in progress but they currently have nothing to show.

Our game piece intake group worked on perfecting past iterations of their intake prototypes. They are going to start discussing how to mount their system into the robot effectively in the near future.

Lastly, our climber group figured out things that wouldn’t work, but I can’t explain further as they never got back to me. Come on Cole, I believed in you and you let me down.

At the end of the week we are starting to feel the effects of stress. We’ve inhaled approximately fifty thousand donuts, twenty gallons of soup (our tree huggers chugging the majority), and too many cups of coffee and tea to even begin to explain.

Please send help.