Busy meeting

Today we had visitors: the Lionotics team from Eastside High School.  They're a rookie team, and they brought their kit of parts, which they hadn't unpacked yet!  So we went through the kit with them and gave them an introduction to the building process.  We hope that they'll do well this season!

We're still planning to have the scrimmage this weekend, in Joe Walker Middle School's multi-use building, from 8 am to 1:30 pm.  We'll probably have seven teams there, and we hope to run practice matches and have build time.  Hopefully, our robot (and PHI Alpha's) will be at least somewhat improved since the last scrimmage.  I'm excited to see what other teams are working on, too!

Right now, we're working on a way to deliver racquetballs from the conveyor belt to a basket on the scissor lift. We're also finishing re-mounting the arm, and we have some other things to work on as well.

Getting ready for the next scrimmage

Our robot has been taken apart and put (mostly) back together yet again.  This past weekend, one of our mentors took home the robot and started measuring things... which led to taking a few things off... and to make a long story short, the robot came back different today than it was the last time we saw it.

Today, our first task was to figure out what to do with the conveyor belt.  Before today, the conveyor belt was slanted, but it held too many racquetballs.  Our solution for this was to mount it vertically, which would make its ball capacity smaller and give us more room to add other mechanisms (a magnet ball delivery system, for example.)  We also need to remount the arm.

We're trying to get all these things finished before the November 19th scrimmage, which we'll be hosting.  We'll be inviting around six other teams from our area, and we plan to run practice matches as well as have free building time.  Hopefully, all the teams that come will be able to have a productive build day and practice tournament.

After the scrimmage

Today, we talked about what we thought of the scrimmage on Saturday, since this was the first meeting since the scrimmage.  In my opinion, we had a lot of fun, and we also made a lot of progress and were able to help other teams.

The scrimmage went much better than I expected.  The night before, Tyler took apart the robot, then put it back together and made it work better than before, so we were actually able to drive in the first match of the scrimmage.  During the course of the day, we made the back wheels chain-driven, mounted the scissor lift, and competed in several matches.  Our new members actually got to drive, and they did really well, considering they had no driver practice!  All in all, it was quite a productive Saturday.

Today, we also found out that we (not Garagebots, as we'd previously thought) will be planning the November 19th scrimmage.  Before then, we need to make several hardware and software changes: make the robot legal, write some autonomies, and make the conveyor belt straight.  Right now, our robot is almost 19" long- about an inch out of our required dimensions.  Our conveyor belt also holds more than 15 balls, so that's another problem we need to fix.

We're also starting driver practice today, and it seems like we need to work on our strategy, because two minutes and thirty seconds is hardly enough time to do anything.  We'll probably need to experiment with what gets us more points (bowling ball vs. crates, for example), but we also need to get faster at driving and picking up crates.  Right now, we can barely grab, fill, and lift a crate in the minute and thirty seconds before End Game.  Hopefully, we can improve with more driver practice.