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.