An apt title as this year's game features balls that are very bouncy. Watching robots crash into things and each other trying to corral them should be quite entertaining.
We have long sessions on Saturdays and on days when there is no school due to in services and other non educational stuff. Historically we get about half our work for the week done at these. The kids are not tired from a long day, we get more of our adult helpers able to show up, etc.
Kickoff does not count, so this was our first Saturday.
Every session starts with a work board and a toes to the robot meeting.
Drive train and frame are done. Software is dropping a temporary control board on it. We would have been driving had we not had the great wifi outage on Thursday. Note that the wooden part of the bumpers are already complete. This is something that really struggling teams end up doing Late and Badly.
Another thing we don't have in our new home is a reliable scale. With a 125 pound weight limit you have to watch everything. I always ask at this point....think we'll have trouble staying under 125? They always say no. And they are always wrong!
We have a workable intake system in mock up stage but it is a bit ugly. Here's a nice, idealized CAD design instead!
Although I am admittedly, not competent to actually supervise the building of a high tech robot I retain some value as Archive of Ancient Wisdom. Here our test bed robot, which as you can see has been crashed and damaged again, is having a few holes drilled out to mount mechanism prototypes. This one already has the electronics on it. A bit of Ancient Wisdom here: Cover your electronics when drilling metal. A teensy shard in the wrong spot can lead to "Fry and Die" of some expensive gadget.
It was a long session. No radical breakthroughs but one needed design change and steady progress on all fronts. The kids were lagging after 5 hours of this so we had an impromptu "Drive Around". Everyone got the controls for a few minutes and we pushed things around the shop area, did the "Robot Spin" to send the bouncy balls flying, etc. Some of the software and Media/PR staff were particularly entertaining. I was not asked to drive which is probably good for humans and robots generally.
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