Side Project Ideas?

[Mr. Ackroyd]

We host a Robot Rumble for the captial region in NY in which we have teams from NYS and CT join for a day of off season fun. This year our plan is to loan our robot from last year to a rookie team. In the mean time we are working on creating a full defensive robot that our team will use.

The skills we are working on are complete BOM's, CAD, programming, electrical, fabrication and pneumatic's. We have a lot of parts in house to use so ordering should not be a problem. We also have some fun new toys to work with in our shop. New CNC router, new CNC plasma cutter and a new CNC lathe. This is on top of the two mills, two smaller JET lathe's and a large industrial lathe. Oh, and our welding space to work on aluminum welds.

Our plan is for the students to gain skills on CAD so we can hand the drawings off to the fabrication team to build the parts. We are also working with my tech department to incorporate building parts during class time and finish the parts when the team comes in at night.

Should be interesting to see how this works. I really want to work out the kinks pre-season so we are ready to go for build season.