[nixiebunny]

We made a big change this year to go with a wood robot. It was made possible because our build space has a laser cutter. What made the change happen was that a few people on the team decided it was worth pursuing, and one student in particular spent a hundred hours of his own time in December, designing and building three iterations of a wood drive base to learn the techniques and show that it would work.

The result was that by the time that build season rolled around, we were ready to hit the ground running with a new method of building.

It did take a few hundred dollars to pay for parts, but the team decided that it could afford that to expand our capabilities.