March 8th: (First Long) Robotics Meeting

Today was the first robotics meeting that went overtime; there will definitely be more.

Today, lots of progress went down. The tower and algae cannon frame has been better fleshed out. Now, on the mechanical side of things, we see two fallacies that would've been better discovered if we had planned earlier, discussed, did some poking at our design, and actually CADded our design prior to construction. Unfortunately, we spent 4 weeks twiddling our thumbs!

We really need to work on the intake tomorrow as a result. Since we didn't correctly plan everything out before construction, we're not even sure if everything will line up correctly for the ball to index over to the cannon.

Anyways, the electrical team also got lots of progress done today in preliminary preparation for the electrical board. Lots of drilling and screwing in components. We also made a new battery today, isn't that exciting!

Unfortunately, wires are peeving me a bit. We don't clearly have the wires we need and the connectors that we need to wire up everything legally. While everything worked in theory, getting our wiring to be legal will be some trouble since it may be too late to order the wires and connectors we need. Different wire sizes, connections that we don't have or don't support what we need; we'll need to solve the problem tomorrow.

Today's meeting ended at 8PM instead of 7PM. I'm really pushing and hoping for us to stay late on the weekend and earlier in the week so we can get some decent sleep prior to competition. Unfortunately for me, I might be absent on the early days (Monday and Wednesday) because I have to go to class at Chabot, but if the meeting ends late enough or if my class ends early, I'll probably bike back to help out.

Time to go do my homework!

Thanks for reading,
Issac