The Cookie Jar

Our drive team did a fantastic job today!  They scored more goals than most of the other teams.  This put us into 9th place (out of 49 robots) in the qualification matches. We have 3 more qualification matches on Saturday.  Wish us luck!

Ball captured…

and scored!

The vote was unanimous as hands went up to vote laser tag as the must-do event when we go to San Diego for our first competition of the season! While munching away on our little sandwiches, we had a team meeting to hype up about our trip that is less than a week away. We learned about the buddy system, while discussing team positions. And most of all, rest your voices these couple days guys because you’re going to do a heck of a lot of cheering at San Diego as we work our way to the SPIRIT AWARD J

It was yet another busy day in the lab as everyone hurried to put the finishing touches. We worked on measuring out the poly sheets for the sides the robot, made some progress on the kicker, started designing for the driving station board, and organized some tools – just to name a few.  See you in the lab!

Sharon

Yea! At 1:46 pm, Tuesday we shipped!

Early morning ship day beauty shot

Away to San Diego!

Bumper mania!

Back from Anytime Welding, we have the A-Frame!      6 days and counting!

THANK YOU ANYTIME WELDING!!!!!!

Ann

At Anytime Welding..... getting ready

Back in the lab..... it is coming together!

A busy weekend in the lab and the robot is coming along. A-frame and bumper structure are going to the welder 5:30am! Thank you Krystine, Galen and Phil!  The crate is finished! Cool looking art work, awesome painting!…. and check out those washers!  Electrical board is coming along! Roller plates are designed!

More to do…. we hope to have a first lap around the lab on Monday!  Come on in and join the fun!

Ann

Awesome crate!Assembling transmission

Assembling transmission

Electric!

Today, Julia wore brown and white converse to the lab. When she came back, her converse were tropical rain blue. What was she doing? She was painting our wonderful, awesome, almost finished CRATE!!! It was a messy job, but in the end our awesomeness overcame the messiness and we finished painting the interior and exterior of the ENTIRE crate!! During our oh so productive day, we also made good progress on the bumpers. We decided that we’d have four separate bumpers instead of two bumpers that would wrap around the corners of our robot(because of complexity issues). We also decided where we would put the pins!! As I am writing this blog, I can hear the loud whine of metal being cut, which often makes people stop what they are doing, peer over the loft’s wall, cringe and then cover their ears . Why is this metal being cut? Because we are making the super-frame of our robot!!  To continue with a description of our productivity, I should probably tell you that we pressed the bearings into the hubs and screwed the cams for the drive chain onto the chassis.   Also we are making vinyl stickers. Why? To decorate our BREATH TAKING almost finished crate and of course, our ROBOT! We roughly sketched out where we would place the stickers, and made templates for some stickers using adobe photoshop and illustrator. This was a painstaking process, but the stickers will look AMAZING once we actually cut them out of vinyl!! All in all a thoroughly productive day. This however does not mean that tomorrow we can sit down and do nothing. We still need to assemble the substructure for the welder, finish the kicker and hanger designs and then there is the electrical board and of course the drive assembly and programming.  As we are approaching the end of build each day will have to be more productive than the last.

Julia & Maya

(The title will make a lot more sense if you hum the tune of Proud Mary while reading it…)

But, that was mostly what we were doing today!  Thanks to our awesome welders, our chassis is welded and was then sent off to the powder coaters.  But, without that we can’t work on drivetrain, chains, or anything else dependant on the chassis.  So, we worked on prototyping the rollers (another time where Proud Mary lyrics would be aplicable) (That’s the song that goes “Rollin’, Rollin’ Rollin’ on the river”) and the kicker mechanism

With much pushing, yanking, shoving, stretching, and humming of jazz tunes (Christina….) the roller prototype was built and is fairly effective.  We want to try moving and respacing the rollers to see if we can make it work even better!

We also worked on building a kicker, and on trying to fit allll of our doodles and devices and ideas on one robot.  When the chassis gets back we’ll see about actually attaching everything.  See you then!

Yea! Our chassis is welded!

A special thank you to Anytime Welding! You are amazing!  The quick turn around in less than 4 hours!  The welding looks great!  You got us back on schedule!!!!  We are so excited!

Ann and Krystine

Today was another fabulous day here at the lab. We worked on things like rollers, hangers, and our final frame design! We’ve pretty much finished prototyping (almost! Just a few more things left) so we’re working on integrating all the parts so they can work without destroying each other. However, we were disappointed at the amount of no-show members. We only had six girls show up today! This wasn’t nearly enough to work on all the parts we wanted to, so we had to pool all our resources into one project at a time. We understand that a lot of us are busy on the weekends, but we really need to get some more girls in the lab!

On a happier note, we did quite a bit considering our lack of personnel and hope to see everybody at the next meeting! We need everybody up to speed as soon as possible. Have a wonderful day!

So, it’s been a while since our last blog post. But, we’ve still been quite busy in the lab. Finally, the fourth, and final week, of finals have ended! Which means that the lab will be filled with tons of manpower [excuse me, girl power] until the end of build.

Meanwhile, there has been lots of work on the various aspects of the robot during the past week. This past Monday, we decided on our final design, including which kicker and hanging mechanism to use. During the past few days, lots of work has been done on prototyping the kicker mechanism we: laid out a pneumatic board to support the kicker mechanism and began prototyping a second, metal pneumatic kicker system (because the wood split). Currently, we’ve encountered some slight configuration issues with the kicking mechanism, but not to worry, all will be quickly resolved. In addition, there has been much progress on the hanging mechanism, which has proved to be one of the most challenging parts of the game.

As a whole, the team is facing tough deadlines to finish cutting the parts of the chassis to length so it can be sent to the welder on Monday. All in all, “Breakaway” is much tougher than it initially seemed. Despite this, there is one aspect of build season that doesn’t come as much of a surprise each year- Chairman’s award submissions. The writing team met again this week to discuss the essay outline and to break down the authors of each of the subsections of the essay. With it’s creative theme, this year’s submission is bound to be eye-catching.

With 3 and 1/2 weeks remaining, the Space Cookies are trying to keep up the momentum and finish building a triumphant robot!

-Rachel

Marketing/PR Director

CADing the kicker and roller assemblies

Kicker Prototype 2