Wednesday, January 12, 2011

Happy Birthday Shifrah!

Yay for Shifrah, our technical lead, who turned 17 today! Yay for ice cream cake and awesome parents, friends, and... robots!

As for the robot...

We began the day with a prototyping workshop with our mentors Santhi and Noe. We discussed concepts such as brainstorming in general, gears, and working with foam core, etc., and were shown a really cool site with helpful animations [http://robives.com/mechs]. Then we explored a small powerpoint where Andy from AndyMark commented on the different choices that people made in the mechanics of their robot. You can find the blog post through Delphi, but he basically went through every possible "tactical" mechanical choice within the past eight years, and gave his opinions on them. However, his advice was more on the... biased side, and it seemed as if there were less facts for the options he did not like. So I would say to research more on ideas that he may have shot down if you think they may have merit. Who knows, he may be right, but it seemed a bit one-sided.

Then we split up to work on prototypes for the tower. The lifter. The arm. Whatever you want to call it, and so we split up into three groups to work on three different ideas: an "elevator" lift, a four-bar linkage, and a mix of the two which includes only one joint with a sliding extension on the end. The prototypes were just begun tonight, and will be finished tomorrow. The animation team also got to work, and continued sketching out ideas of what will happen, or the story blocking... thing.

Until next time!

~Tobi - the one who won the bet and was not loud for the entire meeting. Which means somebody lost the bet...

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