Off Season It Is....

Well..... Today has been a rather slow day. In the computer room the focus was on organizing our websites and finding places where we can get team buttons and other trinkets. In the machine shop Jeremiah and Ryan worked on a wooden cardinal named Bobby. Tim and Mike worked on the pneumatics on Marvin. The Andrew's and Madeline worked on programing, and gave a demonstration to the rest of the team too. Anna, Ashley, and Hannah worked in "the media corner" on budgeting stuff and searing for other things that can be used for our PR mission and outreach programs. Also... TEAM UPDATE, we are only meeting on Tuesday's now until we can find a day that more people can come.

Jessica Bennett
Blog/Mechanical/PR Sub-team

First offical meeting

Tonight was our first official meeting after the debrief last week. Last week we went over the pros and cons of Boilermaker this year. We talked a lot about what we can do next year to improve our team and our robot.

Tonight we had a major clean up day to start the off season right. We probably will be doing more cleaning in the meetings in the future so that come build season we will be ready to build and not worry about missing tools. For the off season so far we have cut back our meeting schedule to one day a week (Tuesdays from 6:30 or so). Eventually if the mentors and the students have the time during the week we may end up having meetings two or even three nights a week.

So far we already have projects to work on over the off season. Mostly cleaning up but bedsides that there is a pneumatics display that is in progress, a NXT segway may be in the works too. During the off season 1720 will hopefully be working on our various outreach and PR projects, ranging from making sure we have buttons for Boilermaker next year to working on putting together items for demonstrations over the Summer. Things are looking good so far! :)

Jessica Bennett
Mechanical/Blog/PR/Media

It's Packing Time!!!

So today we are going to be loading up pretty much our entire workshop into a trailer along with our robot to take to Purdue for the Boilermaker Regional competition tomorrow. We will finish loading sometime this afternoon and hopefully we will be ready to go at 5:30 AM Thursday for an amazing and fun Regional competition all day Friday and Saturday. Check out http://www.purdue.edu/newsroom/events/2012/120313CreightonFIRST.html for more regional information. Or if you have questions, don't hesitate to leave a comment. :-)

Jessica Bennett

Mechanical/Blog team

Tuesday Work Day

We just worked on our shooting and driving today. So far it is looking like the shooter design we have chosen is going to be more trouble than anything else. For some reason the balls all have different consistencies so they all shoot differently. Our next meeting is not until next Saturday. Hopefully we can have all the bugs in the shooter worked out in time before Boilermaker in March. It's looking better every day!

Jessica Bennett

Mechanical/Blog Team

Post Ship/Bag&Tag Day

There was not a whole lot to do tonight. Basically we just worked on getting the prototype bot in working condition. This means working on the program, fixing the sensors, making sure the turret works, and generally tweaking things. Hopefully by tomorrow we will have a drivable and otherwise fully functional robot so that we can work on our accuracy and driving.

Jessica Bennett

Mechanical/Blog