I'm sure James is totally burnt out after this weekend, so I'll post a quick update- after a monumental final push (just under 12 hours on Saturday and another 9 on Sunday
) by our heroically dedicated students and coaches, we've ironed out most of the last bugs and wrinkles with our design. We have now successfully tested and proven functionality on all of the static defenses, ball pickup, and ball shooting! Of course, anyone who's done this before knows all too well that a robot build is NEVER "finished", so we'll likely be tinkering and tweaking right up to the last minute before bagging and tagging, but things are definitely looking good.
Most of what's left is code and drive practice, and our crack programming team is chugging away on drive tuning, vision, auto move, and awakening sentience in our maniacal artificial intelligence (It's passed a turing test, now we just need to implement the "Destroy All Humans" protocol, currently it's stuck on "Annoy" instead of "Destroy" >_< )
Last bit of good news for now, we had a friend of the team who's previously acted as an inspector at competitions come in and give us a going over, and we've passed robot inspection with flying colors!
I'm sure once James has awoken from his coma he'll be back to post pics/vids and to chime in, but for now good luck to all and see you at the competitions!