Lol, my whole team is rookies, literally. None of us have worked on a FIRST team before, I don't know if our mentor has even been to any past events, lol. We are also a small team of about 10 students, so needless to say the work is sometimes slow. We are lucky that we have one veteren team in the area who can send us replacement parts and give us some guidance (or lend a mentor every so often
) We have realized that a deciding factor in this competition is time management, and have worked through most weekends and stay past 5 or 6 every night. If we can't get into the school, we work outside (building the rack in -20C was an experience, thank goodness for hot drinks), and lately we've been pulling 9pm work sessions. Our typical day now is 7-8:20am robot work, period one class, work on the robot through our second period and lunch, period 3 and 4 classes, and then robot until 9. Actually, today I picked up a pizza and then went to the grocery store to buy drinks, and both cashiers knew who the food was for...is that a good or bad thing? And whoever mentioned the mark drop, it's very true. We can all eventually say with a straight face that a robot once took over our lives...
Anyway, we're hoping to get done on time, I figured out how to do autonomous today (I think) and we just need to, umm,
- finish/mount the arm and manipulator
- cover our ramps
- Put on all the parts that need putting on for autonomous
- Program autonomous (fun!)
- build our operator console
- build the shipping crate
- drive 2 hours to drop off the crate
- party until the competition
- (and by party I mean get our tshirts and banners made, then try to find money for a hotel...)
Well then, good luck to you all, we're going to need it, lol (or lots of energy drinks, hmmmm energy drink...) But I think we'll be ready, I just hope Waterloo is ready for Rambotics...