[Squillo]

We have CAD! some of our students spent the last year working REALLY hard to learn Solidworks (several even passed their first certification test, with flying colors), and yesterday they had lovely drawings of the chassis, gear-pickup-and-placement gizmo, and other basic parts of the robot. It was so exciting to SEE what they are going to build! And so great for them to have the experience of exploring and modifying the design on paper, before building it. And to see and check size and weight, too.

Some prototyping had been done in cardboard, the basic chassis for our drive mule started, and lots of discussion about climbing mechanisms was ongoing. We've decided on a size constraint (we're going with the larger, shorter box, but not filling it at all - we just want a little room to extend out of the perimeter to dump a hopper of fuel and hang the gear), and we'll be using mecanum wheels (we always do, since our swerve experiment was a disaster - maybe in a few years we'll try again to do a new kind of drive system, but this year mecanum should be just fine, so no need to add complexity to our process on that front).

Project management is all organized, and we have basically figured out how we are going to get our robot to the mainland and back without shipping or drayage assistance from FIRST (a huge new hurdle for Hawaii teams this year, apparently none of us got transport exemptions, which was quite a bummer since we spent HUNDREDS of hours over the summer and fall building an awesome new crate, which we basically had to scrap entirely). But fortunately we are having the smallest and lightest robot ever, so that helps.

If all goes as planned (hah!), our robot will be about 75 lbs. without bumpers or battery. Light enough to fly, properly packed, as an oversize checked bag on most airlines. We may have to remove a gizmo and use 2 bags/boxes to fit the size constraints.

I think we're basically on schedule.