How was the build season everyone?
What does your robot do?
Good luck at the regional.
season = stressfull
robot goes too fast!
still have lots to do
Lemme reply in another 12 hours. Sound good?
Ok i will wait.
Repent! The end is [strike]near[/strike] here!
Now to go get some sleeeeeep.
Now I can sleep before I take AP Physics tests.
I’ll sleep now.
Finally, sleep!
What is this sleep you speak of? We need to fix our practice bot and get practice/auto aiming functional. 
We stopped building yesterday, but today still had that rushed feeling with it.
Still, so much to do! Practice bots to finish, driver practice to do, and of course thousands of lines worth of programming.
Luckily we’re a week 5 & 6 regional.
Today was pretty relaxing, we played with the robot, showed off to the principal, and got it in the bag after our final pizza dinner of build season.
The rest of build season went really well, we got the robot done on time and it does most of what we wanted it to do. It will traverse the bridge, pick up balls, store 3 of them, shoot from the key, and it has a 24 pt autonomous mode (if we can get a little ball feeding help from an alliance partner). We didn’t get it to go over the barrier, and we didn’t get the auto aiming working.
Today was the most crowded build day. While our bumpers still need work, we got in much driver practice this weekend and even had to make an emergency repair. I still have to work on a video for the robot and it’ll be posted here first.
Much better than last year’s bag day by a long shot. We were barely working then, but now we had practice with a nearby robot, shot 3 pointers, held the bridge down AND up (which is unique so far) and scored twenty.
On Sunday we attended the SoCal Scrimmage and learned the robot was 28 pounds overweight! We were also top-heavy and tipped twice during scrim matches.
So, Monday and Tuesday we scrambled to rebuild almost everything – shortening the entire frame, rebuilding lightweight versions of a ramp lowering arm, removing extra drive motors. Since we didn’t have a full-robot scale to use, we threw all parts taken off the bot into a box, which we would weigh periodically.
And the term “Put it in the box!” has since been coined, and stuck with the students enough to become a new team motto. Celebrating every time the box gained an extra pound.
We managed to reduce the bot’s height from 59" to 42", still allowing enough room for ball storage and lowering the CG significantly. We’ve lost ~22 pounds in the process so we still have a little more to go, but we’ll get there!
So the team is thinking “inside” the box for the moment, Eric. Great team-building opportunity. And you haven’t mentioned the time-honored and cheesily-named Swiss **re-**movement activity. Watch it make your robot holier-than-thou. 
Well, we put it in the bag at 11:58 last night.
I am not kidding about the time. Needless to say we had to pull guys off of it to put it in the bag. I hope we didn’t miss somebody and bag him up too.
Mostly it works, but there is SO MUCH that could be better!
Nobody wanted to go home; they played 3 on 3 basketball for a while.
We bagged ours at ~8:30, and kept back the shooter so we could continue dialing it it. Overall, I think that it should be an interesting competition. I’m proud of my team - this year’s robot is, by far, the most complicated robot we’ve ever made. And I think that competition will reflect that - we should be a fairly strong force at Greater Kansas City and Oklahoma.
There’s nothing like that feeling when you break something at 1030pm on stop build day and the school closes at 11. That equals stressful!!
It will be fixed by the competition next week!!
Can’t wait for the competitions!!