January 15th: Robotics Meeting

Today was good.

We had a shortened Robotics Meeting today, since our advisor, Mr. K, had to leave early to purchase supplies for our fundraisers.

At the start of the meeting I helped with deciding what we wanted to purchase from FIRST Choice by Andymark. We decided on purchasing some additional game pieces, some Kraken motors, and some other sensors and wires.

Next, I discussed the robot plan and got the CAD models started. Hopefully they are finished soon!

Afterwards, I had to fix the laptop. Last meeting, when I opened up the laptop, I didn't attach on the back cover correctly, so the back cover was not fully flush with the rest of the system. However, when I kept opening and shutting the screen, the hinge kept bulging out. When I further opened the screen up, it was discovered that the screw holes for the hinges had disintegrated, which meant that the hinge wasn't moving along with the rest of the display assembly when you were opening and closing the laptop. Basically, the laptop was a ticking time bomb for when the bezel would pop out when you were opening or closing the laptop.

As a temporary solution, I put in a piece of a chopstick as the hinge of the laptop.

We also tried to add some extra ram to the system, but for some reason, the laptop would only detect one stick of ram when it had 2 slots of ram and it could support 16gb of ram.

Anyways, right now, the laptop isn't functional for some reason. I don't think it's very repair friendly, and I think it might be complaining about where the OEM ram is located. I'll try to fix it tomorrow! Hopefully!

After the meeting, I went to Walgreens to buy some super glue for the hinge. Hopefully the super glue is strong enough for the hinge! Although it's very necessary to buy a new laptop, I'd like to make this laptop last, because we don't have it in our budget to buy a new one. I also don't want to waste the 12 hours I've worked on it so far on fixing it up.

Thanks for reading,
Issac