[eedoga]

This weekend was really good for us. We had some real successes and are hopefully back on schedule. I was feeling like things were going too slowly and that too much was up in the air.

Going into this weekend it felt as though we hadn't accomplished anything real. Things were also going really slowly. So cutting out parts seemed to take forever...We would have a meeting and three parts would be made at the end with 1 of them cut out wrong and needing to be redone...Our welding mentor got stuck doing paperwork so we thought we might have to build the robot using rivets and brackets...So we furiously began cutting out brackets and bought out all the rivets the nearest harbor freight had in stock...

So...This weekend...

We drove...Just the base and electronics board, but we drove around using our holonomic drive train.

We got our base frame welded.

We got our battery moving mechanism mounted.

We built the frame of our rear lift mechanism.

We built our front gripper claw frame and mounted the dart linear actuator. (still needs a bit of work, mostly figuring out the bolt needed to connect the bracket we made to the end of it.

We decided things, like using square tube for our gripper rails instead of 80/20, and making an electronics cover using 1/16th polycarb...

We also got in some parts that our material sponsor, Bowman Manufacturing, laser cut for us. (they came in at 7 PM tonight.)

We welded up the practice frame.

Really this next week we can focus on finalizing fabrication and initial assembly, then the Guild, the art club on campus can have at it to make it pretty. :-) (The community stressed that they wanted little artistic flourishes throughout the robot.)

Did I mention that we learned how to anodize!? :-)

What a weekend. The really cool thing is that there is no school on Thursday because we are changing over semesters, so the team gets the whole day to work, though we may break early tomorrow so that people have time to study for their finals.

Honestly though I am feeling much better now than I did even on Friday.

Great work everyone!

Edoga