So for any of you who follow our blog… Wow! You must really like us because we kind of dropped off the planet for a while. Don’t worry, we will do better from now on.
Meanwhile let me catch you all up from… seriously it was JULY since we posted last??? I had to look it up! Ok so to start off, we did NOT do any off season competitions. It turns out that somehow we missed the deadline for signing up and didn’t know it. We still did our Build Season 2.0 as a practice but the results did not get to compete. And that result? A WORKING SWERVE DRIVE!!!! Well… it WAS working until one of the gears slipped off and jammed a swerve pod. So it hasn’t ACTUALLY worked since August when we had to take them apart to fix them. And what was the sage advice from the manufacturer as to how to keep the gear from slipping off? “Put some glue on it…” Yeah… that’s what we got. And we did it too, as well as built a better drive base while we were at it. So it is ready to test right now, except… well we have been kind of busy as of late. Let me tell you about it. Don’t worry, I’ll be quick. You’re probably already thinking this is too long but hey, this is 4 months of catch up here. So…
In September we rebuilt the swerve Drive base and called it PS2 (Prototype Swervebot 2 not the popular game console) along with learned a new CAD program and prototyped a bunch of telescoping arms.
In October we took our robot to scare- I mean help families choose just the right pumpkin at the Gain FCU pumpkin Patch. We also participated at the Engineering Expo 2023 with team 589 and California State Senator Anthony Portantino to show the community exactly what robotics is all about.
In November we opened our workshop doors and invited the Burbank community and businesses to come meet us and see what we do. (There may have been some time off to eat large amounts of turkey in there too)
And in December we hosted the brand new FIRST Lego League Regional Competition in Burbank! Something we intend to do annually. Then, just this last weekend, our robot was working again, with a bunch of team 980 Santa helpers, helping to collect toys for the Spark of Love Toy Drive put on by the Burbank Fire Department.
Like I said, it’s been a busy 4 months. This week, preseason ends with our traditional family pot luck. I’ll tell you all about that next week along with some thoughts about the past season and the new season coming up way too fast.
So see, we really were here all along, and all the excitement that you missed is nothing compared to what is to come. Stay tuned!
-Alex
Co-Lead mentor