Team 980 has been clocking long hours the past few weeks getting the robot ready to ship. We’re almost there!
We passed on the pre-ship scrimmage Sunday in favor of focused assembly and test of the robot. Our dedicated group of students made great progress with the robot. Our kicker performs quite well. We improved our motor configuration for the ball roller. The electronics are neatly packaged on two lexan boards located behind the kicker. The front suspension is robust and will soften landings when going over the bumps. The robot is very modular and quite serviceable. We’ll remove the kicker and ball roller assemblies before shipping. We can fine-tune these mechanisms prior to our initial competition in Arizona (Mar 11-13). Our robot lifting mechanism design is preliminary, but we’ve got an innovative yet rather simple approach to get on the tower or hang from an elevated robot.
This week, we are meeting today (Monday) to get the crate loaded with the robot, cart, etc. (the FedEx pick-up is on Tuesday). We’ll take a couple days off and meet again on Thursday to lay-out plans for our post-ship activities. In order to have a practice robot, we’ll need to fabricate a frame, then attach the mechanisms and electronics we are allowed to withhold from shipping. If we assemble the frame this Saturday, we’ll have 10 days for practice driving, controls testing, and final tune-up for competition.
Team 980 thanks our partner, NEY, for hosting us in their new community center. We will are fortunate to have such a fine space for designing and building our robot. Over the next few weeks, we’ll continue to work with Team 2404 so they too have a very competitive robot for the Los Angeles Regional at the end of March.
Congrats to our students who have put in a terrific effort this year under challenging circumstances. The really fun part is just around the corner!!
