How Late does your team Stay?

[John Bono]

Team 990: We have three classes working on it (42 minutes 3 days a week and 85 minutes one day a week each), and the "devoted" of us work an hour or two after school--although me and FAK'll be there for two or three, what with having only 6 of 8 classes. Saturdays a few people show up from 8-noon, although we coulodn't do that this week with our advisor (physics teacher) at a science bowl tournament or something like that. Next weekend, I expect to spend 16 hours there--which is quite a bit for me. I'm really vying for the driver's spot this year, even though I don't know the software well (we find that gamers make the best drivers--and I'm near the best you'll ever see).

[srjjs]

Our teachers don't let us stay past 8:30. We've found that half of the team stops working after dinner anyways. Sleepy people do not make the best builders.

[Rickertsen2]

our mentor only lest our team stay until about 5:00-5:30 on weekdays and not much later on weekdays. We are seriously behind due to these constraints. Hopefully we will be able to work later these last few days.

[Madison]

Not long enough?

We don't stay anywhere near long enough to get work done, we suffer from a severe lack of long range planning and anticipation of our needs, and we're nearly being forced to ship a day early.

All to screw me over, I'd think.

[srjjs]

Originally posted by Rickertsen2
our mentor only lest our team stay until about 5:00-5:30 on weekdays and not much later on weekdays.

No, 5:00-5:30 isn't much later than 5:00-5:30.

[hixofthehood]

Wow yeah....I had no idea everybody stayed that long.

Our meeting schedule is 6:00-8:30 Monday-Thursday
9:00-4:00 Saturday

I'm tired just thinking about 10 to 10.

[tenfour]

We work longer if it is just grunt work. If we need to actually do some complicated work (like design, etc.).

[PhatalEphekt]

Well, usually I am there from 3pm - 9pm. But on weekends and days we have off, I am there from 8am - 9pm. Like a couple of weekends ago, we had a 4 day weekend. 46 hours in 4 days. Dang that was crazy. Got a lot done though.

Scott

[Jeff Waegelin]

We typically go until about 5:30 until the last two weeks. Then, we add about a half-hour a day (or so it seems). Now, we're goin until about 7:30, but the last few days, we'll probably stay till midnight. We rarely go past then, but we have occasionally.

[kristen]

Our team has been going 5:30-9 on school nights, and 9-5 on Saturdays. We've been getting sundays off from robotics

[Harrison]

Our team has been staying later and later as this thing goes on...but we are getting a lot done...(altho being tired isnt always good when working on machienery....my finger met a ban saw the other day ...luckily it only sliced me a little).

But, there is a matress where we're building the bot....so we can take a nap if we really want to (today the bot was pushing the matress and the person on it around on the floor...lol)

[dlavery]

Our weekend so far:
Friday: school is closed due to the snowstorm on the east coast, which means we can't get into the shop. No work gets done on the machine. All the parts of the mobility system that were going to arrive at the end of this week cannot be delivered, because the school is closed. Since there are no Saturday deliveries, we won't get our stuff until at least Monday. That four-day delay is going to hurt.

Saturday: Almost the whole team arrives at the shop at the school to start work at 9:00am. During the day we decide that waiting until Monday for those ever-so-special 14-tooth gears is going to put us too far behind, so we re-calculate some of the center-to-center distances in our transmission design, and substitute slightly suboptimal 15-tooth versions that we have on hand. Steven wanders off, new drawings in hand, to the shop to start milling out version 3 of the side plates for the transmission. The school closes at 5:30pm, so six of the students and I pack stuff on over to the shop in my garage, and start work again at 6:00pm. Pizza arrives from Papa John's at 8:30pm. It is gone by 8:32pm. 9:00pm and it is cold (did I mention that there was a snow storm yesterday?), and the kerosene heater just ran out of fuel. Spill kerosene all over the garage floor while refilling the fuel cell. Use nearly an entire roll of paper towels mopping up the mess, and dispose of them carefully in a metal can (no spontaneous combustion catching the house on fire for us!). It is now 10:30pm and it is frikkin' COLD! So we fire up the forge and use it as an additional space heater. By midnight Steven has finished milling out the last of the side plates for the transmission, for the fourth time (#$%@# metric gears with #@$% ENLARGED teeth throwing off the center-to-center calculations!). We decide to quickly spray paint them black before re-building the transmissions. By 1:00am we discover that fast-drying paint really is, and it also DOES NOT wash off your fingers with soap and water, no matter how blisteringly hot you make the water. Sigh. I will just have to wait for it to wear off. By 3:00am Kyle has just about finished wiring the control system, except for running the last of the PWM cables that we left at the school. Have to remember to find them tomorrow. At 3:15am we find that grabbing the wrong end of a pencil soldering iron is a really bad idea. I have a new burn hole in my jacket. We decide that we are too goofy and unproductive to continue, so the students leave at 3:30am, with a promise to pick up some valve-grinding compound from Fairfax Auto Supply on the way back.

Sunday morning, way too early:
A few hours of sleep, see the family, grab a quick shower and a breakfast of Krispy Kremes and Diet Coke, and then back in the garage shop. Students arrive at 10:00am, and - yes! - they have valve compound in hand. As we suspected, it makes great lapping compound when it is early Sunday morning and there is NO WAY you are going to get lapping compound from any usual sources before Tuesday. It is still frikkin' cold, so fire up the "space heater" once again. There is some talk about just melting down everything that we have built and turning it all into little cast aluminum teapots or something, but that quickly subsides. Work until 1:00pm, then pack everything up and troop back to the school where the rest of the team is gathering. We spend most of the afternoon lapping in the gears on the drives and building up the rest of the mobility system while others on the team are practicing driving with ED V2.0 from 2001. Kyle and Sean have the line-following and stack-seeking software working, and are tuning it with the mini-bot they built from the EduRobotics kit. They should be finished with the "self-destruct" code by tomorrow. If our treads and pulleys arrive tomorrow, we should be driving ED V4.0 with the new transmission by the end of the day. If not, we have our emergency substitute temporary solution utilizing lawn mower wheels that will be working on Tuesday. Everyone works until 6:00pm, when we get thrown out of the school again. They are calling for more snow again late tonight, so we haul a bunch more stuff back to the garage in case school is cancelled again and we have to work there tomorrow. Spend the next few hours updating the transmission drawings with the changes we made, and cleaning up our design notes. A little bit of work on the White Paper we are writing to update the no-CNC/no-EDM transmission design we published earlier. Just enough time to check up on the CD boards before midnight...

So let's see. 48-hour weekend. 31 hours working on FIRST. Yeah, that seems just about right.

-dave


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Jokes that are REALLY FUNNY at 3:30am, but at almost no other times:

John: What are "ferrous metals"?
Dave: They make wheels out of them.
John: Huh?
Dave: Yeah, you know, "Ferrous Wheels"

Sean: But what about polycarbonate?
Dave: Rides on the wheels.
Sean: Hhuuuhhh???
Dave: Yeah, you know, Polly - Polly Carbonate. She rides on the Ferrous Wheels.

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[WakeZero]

Lets see... it is Sunday night... I just got back from working on the robot. The last time I sat in my own room was about 2pm on Saturday... my hands are bleeding, and my I am very tired. You tell me how many hours, I can't do the math right now

[gilachick]

I'll do it for you brian. We get home from classes go straight to the school. We work from about 4-7 on weekdays. On fridays we stay a little later. And this weekend we worked saturday from 8-2 am on sunday 8-9 pm. And I am sure that we still have many hours to go.

[Marc P.]

A typical weekday will start around 4-5pm, after homework, after school activities are done, etc. Most students will trickle home around 8-9pm, but the "hardcores" will stay until the engineers leave. Problem with that is, the engineers don't leave until the students leave. What you end up with is 2 or 3 students staying with the engineers until 1:30-2am, until both sides decide to call it quits. The result- if you're seriously involved on our team, you'll be staying well past midnight on 4 out of 5 weeknights, and in some cases later on weekends.