Week 4: Day 19

 As we reach our midway point, we've come to the end of our testing and are preparing for our final build. Nathan took a portion of the mechanical and programming subteams to the gym to test his mortar-like device. Although we had plenty of trouble, at the end of the day the projectile launcher works quite well and we were able to launch balls into a basketball goal consistently (>90%). Mike has stated that his team is nearing completion of their shooting mechanism and by tomorrow they should have an idea of whether or not they will use it on our robot.

When the programming team wasn't working alongside Nathan, we managed to get our classmate running perfectly for this year's competition (the classmate is our driver station computer, and for this year we had to reimage and update the system). With some help online, we got our camera feed to transfer directly from our robot's router as opposed to sending the data from our cRIO. By doing this, we are able to use one of our newer cRIO's and our picture quality is greatly improved. We now have an FPS rate that will greatly increase our drive team's visibility of the field. Last year in particular the FPS rate caused our team some considerable trouble.

Time is running low, but we're just getting started!

Andrew Rhine
Programming and electrical subteams

Week 3: Day 18

Today attendance was low but a lot of progress was made. Mathew Prymek, Dakotah, and I worked on our prototype Launcher. Nathan and Mathew Plamowski worked on their version of the launching prototype. Mike, Anna, Ashley and Jessica all worked on a ball gathering prototype. Maggie worked on programming.

Tyler 

Mechanical Team

Week 3: Day 17

 Tonight in the programming section we got a new member to start teaching Labveiw, we had both of our new programmers create calculators as practice and they each came up with very different methods for creating them. We also got a re-imaging key for our driver station laptop. In the mechanical section work still continues on prototypes for the ball launcher and ball collection devices.  

Andrew Shaffer 
Programing/Electrical Team

Week 3: Day 16

Matthew, Madeline, Andrew S., and Andrew R. worked on the Kinect and figuring out how it works.
Tyler, Dakotah, and Nathan were working on the shooter prototype.
Gary, Ryan, Matthew, and Jeremiah were making the hoops for the ball to go through.
Dakotah made the handle to pick up the robot.
Anna and I took videos and photos.






Ashley Martin
Media/Mechanical Team

Let the Race Begin: Day 15

Hey what is up? I don’t know, but let's talk about robotic anyway. Tonight we worked on the mock field. They were testing out the goals to see if the balls will go through. We finely decided to go with a single direction shooter. We also worked on a ball pick up using a screw like system. OK that is all I know about today, have fun looking at the Photos.

Anna Dodd
Media Team

Build Season: Week 3 Day 14

Today has been a very productive day. We had some people visit form the Ball State Academy. They filled in some of the gaps that were left by a few of our team members who don't come on Sundays. 

All of the prototypes are coming along nicely. There are still a lot of things that need to be tweaked. I think now we have a pretty good idea about what we want our robot to look like and what we want it to do. Currently we have a semi-set idea of how the pick up mechanism is going to work. The storage space/ball lifter is coming along nicely. Right now the kicker/launcher/dunking prototype is giving us the most trouble.

Jessica Bennett