WOW! I can barely believe it’s already Week 5! Where has the time gone? I bet the time daemon ate it 🙂 As of Saturday, most of the sub-systems are complete with the exception of our hopper and climber. Below is 1 teaser photo of the robot & another of how well we can shoot. Also, there have been some major modifications to one of the items pictured, but you’ll have to wait to see what we changed!

Sunday

R&R day! Today we had fun driving around our practice bot in Howe Atrium since we didn’t receive our parts yet from Quality to build our sub-systems.

Monday

Today we got our parts back from Quality Manufacturing. We were excited to start fabricating our sub-systems. We also held a parents meeting that was pushed back from last Wednesday.

Tuesday

More assembly of our sub-systems made by Quality.

Wednesday

Some of our students attending STEM Day at the State House in Des Moines. You can read more about it in this blog post. We also got the last parts back from Quality today!

Thursday

Shooter & Hopper were being finalized today, along with other odds & ends.

Friday

We started trying out our finalized shooter. We got most of our frisbees in. Programmers were working hard tonight as well.

Saturday

We played with the shooter and dialed it in to make it perfect. We also shot high-speed video of our shooter mechanism to see how a frisbee goes through it so we can improve it.

Note: I’m sorry I’m not updating much on the programming side of the build team, but I am not involved in that portion as much. We have a drivable robot, and have had for weeks thanks to them! They are the most important component of our team and without them, we couldn’t have a successful driving and scoring robot. THANK YOU Programmers! (And yes, we will hopefully have a robot to you by next Monday or Tuesday!)

Update: Talk about our teaser with us on Chief Delphi. Share your thoughts & join in on the guessing!

Sunday

A wonderful horrible winter storm hit today. A few people made it into the shop today to continue work on fabrication.

Monday

This morning Aren sent in our CAD parts to be fabricated by our amazing fabrication sponsor, Quality Manufacturing! Quality Manufacturing is a GREAT company that not only is sponsoring us this year, but they also picked up the newly formed Ankeny Team #4646 as well. We can’t thank you guys enough for all you do! We made the frisbee pick up mounts and prototyped our alignment system. One of our members also loaded the rest of our belongings that were in Christy Hall into their car.

Tuesday

Today we mounted our electronics on our practice bot, along with unloading our stuff from the member’s car into our storage area. Alex, Bojun, and David continued designing parts for Kraken in MasterCAM that were made on the CNC.

Wednesday

Iowa’s wonderful horrible winter weather hit last night again, leading to freezing weather today and a snow day for everyone except the parents. There were about 3 people working on assembly today.

Thursday

We started mounting electronics on our practice bot, along with finishing up assembling drivetrain modules.

Friday

Things have been really coming together! Tonight we ran on caffeine until 10. We got the practice bot up and running along with the basic pneumatics working! It’s so nice to have an awesome practice bot! We also mounted the speed controllers as well.

Saturday

Wow! Today was a busy day in Boyd Lab. We finished mounting and running most of the electronics that we could for our drive train on the competition robot. It’s getting exciting! We really shortened things up this year to make them super nice. We also started prepping pneumatics & running some tubing as well. We can’t wait to get our parts back from Quality to construct Kraken, shooter, and the other systems we have. Our goal is to have the competition robot complete by the end of next week. Included is a “teaser” of our robot of our beautiful wiring that we have completed so far. The pyramid is almost complete as well. Until next week, go teams!

Good morning, or afternoon, or night, or whenever you’re reading this. If you are on an FRC team, hope your team is doing well. We are doing pretty well ourselves.

Monday

We continued work on our CAD and pretty much finalized it. Some of the kids continued to work on building the pyramid. We also worked on making parts for our drive train assembly.

Tuesday

We found out we aren’t very good button makers…. yet. We continued making parts for the drive train assembly. We started working with the Bridgeport CNC.

Wednesday

We organized the shop today and moved our stuff into a storage area across the street in Black Engineering.

Thursday

We continued doing pre-fabrication work on the Bridgeport. The VEX order was also sent in today. We began organizing our stuff.

Friday

We got our master order sent in tonight. Fabrication also began today of our drive train, which we got 9 modules mostly assembled. We also got our hood latches for the bumpers. Work on Kraken also began.

Saturday

We finished up our work on the Bridgeport. Fabrication of the chassis for both of our practice and competition bots were initiated and completed tonight, weighing in at a slim 35 pounds. We also a dance held here in the shop after we lost 3 of our fellow Neutrinos to their winter formal, which went successful I might add.

Hello!
Nice to see you again! This week we have been extremely busy.

Saturday

We split into several teams. One team CAD’ed, another team prototyped the pickup mechanism, and another prototyped the shooter mechanism.

Monday

We continued CAD’ing, prototyping, and strategizing for the rest of the week. The electronics/programming team also met and were practicing programming.

Tuesday

We held a team meeting that went pretty well discussing regionals and other team things as well.

Friday

We started importing the drive train/chasis into MasterCam then we started CNC’ing it. There was a team that started practicing welding. Another team also started building the field (pyramid/feeder slots)

Saturday

We did outreach at the ISU FIRST LEGO League State Championships from 9-12. Check back later this week for the post about that. Once we got done, we continued importing the rest of the drive train/chasis into MasterCam then finished CNC’ing them. Another team started detailing the CAD models of the specific modules we are putting on our robot. A few people continued work on the feeder slots.

Hello World!
It is Day 10 and most of the team had no school today because we are starting the last semester of the year in high school tomorrow (and for some, the last day of their last semester in their high school career). We got a lot done today, spending almost 7 hours in the shop.

Our mentor Aren was warming up his left over Chinese, engineer style, because we still don’t have a microwave in the shop. We are hoping to get one soon so this madness with heat guns can stop.

We were working on designing a cardboard prototype of our robot based on our sketch in CAD from this past Saturday.

Matthew took a drill to a cardboard tube. This didn’t end up working very well. We are already losing our minds, and it’s barely a week into build season!

“We’re ready to bag it!”… Only our Cardboard copy!

Since the new semester started, new students in Mechanical Engineering Classes & other Engineering classes here at Iowa State University were touring Boyd Lab and came through to see the Mechtronics Lab.