[Gui Cavalcanti]

Oy... this topic always hurts everybody on our team to talk about this year. We pride ourselves in being a think tank. We had a kickoff meeting the Tuesday after the game was announced, and conceptualized these awesome robots that could do everything but were so incredibly out of scale we laughed when we measured them. Our project manager, a senior this year, kept egging us on to tweak our designs a little bit, they weren't quite ready yet... until week 3. In the middle of week 3, he left for a ski trip and we never saw him in the build room again.

So yeah. In week 3 our team mom came in and saw us all looking dazed, still trying to conceive different designs with all sorts of permutations with ball grabbers/goal grabbers/ball-goal grabbers, etc. and no robot at all. She then gave us a quick speech on how much this event cost the team and what exactly she would do to us if a chassis was not on wheels moving around by the end of week 4. At that point, we scrapped design, went for the most effective idea we could manage (fast one-goal grabber with an unbreakable hold that is reliable and can move around the field with the greatest of ease), and built the darn thing.

You can see the results of our hurried work.. the frame holding our electronics was assembled in less than 2 hours, so it always looks... kind of off. The previously 80 pound aluminum chassis has holes cut in it the size of a dinner plate or two combined. The only precision work on the robot would be the making of gearboxes for the Chiaphuas, which our engineer voluntarily toiled over for 20 hours straight with a lathe (those gears they send us are incredibly hard to machine, as most of you know). We always joke around by saying "When big name FIRST teams talk precision, they're talking around 1/1000th of an inch. When the Mech Techs talk precision, they're talking 'Oh, an inch or two should do'." Even though I joke, however, we still met the goals we set in week 3 on the field - we have a fast robot that, when attached to the goal, has a virtually unbreakable grip (for FIRST robot standards), and it's extremely reliable.

<edit> If we were to do it again, I can easily tell you we would've been a ball collector grabbing at least one goal, because that was our original intention. </edit>