I found some pictures taken various times during the build season. Let me show you our great "engineering takeover." I tried to keep these pics to a minimum size so they load fast.
The season began with the
students dividing into groups and coming up with different ideas for the robot out of cardboard. As the design materialized, notes were taken and sketched about the various components to be designed.
We worked on the CAD in our classroom. We loaded our Inventor on our laptop, and other people on the team brought their own laptops to work on from home. While one person designed one thing, the other did some dimensioning. With the funds left over from last year, we were able to buy our own brand new P4 laptop.
For the new people, we laid the motors out on a piece of plywood, attached some PWMs and the control system, and showed people how those all work. Last year I was completely clueless about what a PWM did, how it did it, and why it modulates the pulse - this year I was teaching the new kids about 'em.
As the major fundraiser, we made a deal with a local Mercedes dealer to raffle off a Mercedes that was given to us at a significant discount. The way it worked is all the students sold $50 tickets to parents, co-workers, family, local businesses, neighbors, etc. The grandprize winner had the option of taking either the car or half the money that was raised. In this case, the grandprize winner opted for the money. This is a picture of us awarding a check for $13,400. If that's half the money we raised, that means we raised $23,800 with this raffle. At $50 a ticket, well you do the math and see how many tickets we as a team sold.