Open Pits

We’ve been so busy the past week, that there was little time for blogging. The team, @Valus Valoo, an army of one, has been working on the crash robot, as I call it. Its just the fastest thing he can throw together. I’ve been trying to teach him to plan it more, draw it, or mock it up in some way, but he is stubborn. He does have fun building though and doesn’t get discouraged when he has to tear it all down again because it doesn’t quite work. I’m also trying to get him more organized and encourage him to post everything he does.

Meanwhile, I have been cleaning the garage, cleaning my desk, helping organize parts, and order more parts. We only have a starter set and we seem to run out of useful parts fast. Then it gets much hard to build things from the leftovers. We have almost nothing for linear actuation but he figured out something with a chain and sprockets. However, there are few parts left for a hopper, so he is designing one in cad for printing. This is a much slower process.

We attended the Robot League’s Open Pits meeting online. It was fun to meet some other coaches and teams. The coordinator said we might try the Roboticon this weekend. However, we don’t have much assembled and nothing programmed. Maybe we are better to use the day working. They also gave us some helpful advice about recruiting other team members. The most useful thing I found out was that I need to buy 4 additional batteries for competition days. We only have 1, which I thought we would be able to recharge fairly quickly. So I ordered some of those.

I just might be blogging this to procrastinate cleaning the garage. Better get back to work.