December 1st: The First Day Of December, and Robotics Meeting

Today was tiring, again!

It's the first day of December! Winter break will happen soon and the first semester will finish soon.

After school there was a Robotics Meeting held to finish constructing the robot. School ended at 3 today, so we had extra time to finish it, but only 1 hour more. It's our last day to finish the robot before Mechanical Mayhem.

The engineering team continued to construct the kicker mechanism and the drive base parts, and the electrical team continued to create the battery holder, as well as crimp the wires for the Neo 550, which is for the kicker mechanism. The electrical team had a long hard time adding the anderson powerpole connectors (which we experienced last year) but one of our new members managed to find a way better, more efficient way to add the connector, which will be great for the future.

With the programming team, we configured with the camera system. We created the code for the kicker mechanism. The members split up the work into adding the dependencies, declaring and initializing the motor object, reading the input from the controller, and creating the conditional for when the button was pressed, the motor would actually turn, and if it wasn't, the motor would stay still.

After all of that, it was around 7 and many people had already left, but luckily many people were still around to help us finish the robot. The engineering team continued to create the mechanism for the kicking mechanism, as well as installing the mounts for the motors. At 8 (if I recall, I'm very tired) the electrical team finished constructing the battery mount, which would help us pass inspection.

At this point in the meeting there were around 7 people around to continue building the robot. No one was focused on a single part of the robot; we were all doing everything we could to finish the robot.

We had to 3D print a lot of parts for our robot because we were supposed to purchase them from VEX or REV, but we discovered we needed this parts at the very end.

Anyways, we ended up staying until 11PM to finish constructing the robot. We still weren't finished. At the end of the meeting it was discovered that both of the 3D prints for the gears for the wheels had failed. For the first 3D printer, the nozzle had gotten clogged, and for the second 3D printer, there wasn't enough glue applied, so the piece warped upwards and it wasn't affixed properly to the plate.

At this point we can only hope that the 2 hours in the morning would be enough time to finish the robot. I think I'm going to only sleep around 4 hours tonight.

Hopefully we do well in Mechanical M-Ayhem tomorrow!

Thanks for reading,
Issac