In one way or another, most of the build team has worked every day since kickoff. Thank God we have tonight off
Right now we have everything conceptualized in CAD, with spacial representations of what we believe will be the final manipulator. We are further testing various subcomponents of the manipulator (a conveyor belt, hopper, and turretted shooter system) and should have a CAD ready for it by the end of next week. Building of production-quality subcomponents probably will not start until then, but we're acquiring the necessary parts now.
The drive train CAD is fully completed, the parts are ordered, and the frame construction has begun. With as much time as we've put in already, the drive train would already be done except we didn't decide to do a new (to us) type of drive train until kickoff day. So we instead put the new wheels on our '08 prototype bot ("tank" drive) and the driver is getting practice in slippery conditions.