I am alive. Give me a name!

"This is your robot here writing to you. I started moving a little bit today. Please give me a name soon. Or perhaps you can name me 'Untitled' like one of those fancy paintings in museums if y'all are lazy butts" - Team 1700 Chassis

Rock on build team for getting lots done today!

Julia worked on getting all the components on the electronics board that Bud made and Emily and Beth screwed everything down.

Chrissy and Kersten went with Chris to Aluminum REM (which was closed by noon?) and went to a new fanagled place called Triangle Machinery or something like that. They brought back an 1/8" sheet of stainless steel and lots of bling. What fun!

Chrissy and Kersten also assembled much of the chassis, and tried earnestly to cut through the 1/8" thick sheet of stainless but wore out the jigsaw blade after 3 mm ;( Looking into options at Toolland and such.

Erin did a great job heat shrinking all our connections and doing some much needed labelling of parts. That's going to come in handy when we're debugging no doubt.

Christina, after a grueling morning with the SATs came by and patiently finished the turret i.e. filed open the holes for the limit switches to sit in. We have code to make the turret run, but will need to test it out. Once we get the turret running like we want it to, we'll bring in the camera code.

Doug came by and was put to work immediately on helping to debug the robot. We downloaded some code and discovered that the left transmission wasn't getting any input. We ruled out the code, and the power supplies, and are now focused on figuring out what is wrong with the drivers (speed controllers, Victor 488). Yikes. Much more to do here.

Emily is going to make two 'hubs' tomorrow and bring them to Kersten on Monday to test out so that we can try to avoid spending lots of money on new hubs. Boy are they expensive at IFI.

Bud is working on making a simple drill guide so that we can cut holes center on the 80-20, 0.5" from the edge.

Let's finish up the chassis soon (by Monday night?) so that the programming team can work to optimize some of the basic driving stuff.

Turret and launching mechanism need a lot of help as of today, from mounting the motor to building the structural elements. The faster we design and build everything, the more time we will have to actually make the code work. Debugging electronics code takes a long time!!

Cool. We're at 24 days left. Not many!

Em