Middle of the Season

It's in the middle of the season and we're all trying our best to stay caught up with where we're supposed to be. The robot game this year is turning out to be even more difficult than we'd expected.
Some of the ideas that we thought would totally work have totally failed. So, we're trying to our best to fix these errors and create new ways around other problems.

We are primarily focused on being able to climb our way up the mountain that we showed you a few posts back. If we are able to do that, then we will be able to get high enough to be able to hang from the top bar of the obstacle, and receive a great amount of points.

The treads that we thought were going to work and help us up the mountain only reduced our traction and damaged the frame of the robot. To be honest, we were pretty shocked when we saw the results, but we knew that we had to create another solution to climb the red and blue monster.

We tried taking the treads off, and that helped a bit, but our wheels were getting stuck in between the bars of the mountain, so we decided to replace the middle wheels with gear-like wheels that would be able to catch on the bars and propel us up higher than before. It worked, but only once. So, now we are improving this strategy and adding weight to the robot so that it is less likely to spontaneously flip over when climbing.

This year is definitely a challenge, but we are definitely doing our best to overcome what we can. As long as we have the confidence and perseverance that is required, we're sure that we'll be able to overcome all of these flaws.

Experimenting with the wheels

Some of the new ideas we have: chains

Researching for needed parts

Working Hard

It's a ways into the season, and things are looking up to the stars for us. We've been working hard with fundraising, trying to let people know that we need money in order to fund our robot, and to send us really grateful for.

to future competitions, if we make it. So far, people have been incredibly generous! We've reached over one thousand dollars so far, to which we are really,

If it weren't for the people who have donated, we would never have gotten this far, and because of them, we will have enough money to buy more parts, spread the word about FTC, and even be able to donate to other teams like us.

So, we're giving a huge shout-out to our donors. We love you guys! If you would like to help us along on our path and donate to us, you can visit our page with the link below. There you'll find all of us, and be able to visit our individual pages.

Here is the link.

On other matters, we've been brainstorming hard about ideas in which to score the most points. Our biggest goals for point scoring is to be able to hang from the highest point of the "mountain," and to be able to collect as much "debris" as possible and deposit it into the boxes on the mountain. These two things will most likely get us the most points in the quickest amount of time.

Our strategy is to conquer the most valuable and important obstacles first, and then add on the smaller ones later in the season. That's going off of last year's experience. People are right when they say to learn from your mistakes.

The season's going great for us so far, so hopefully we'll be able to keep our heads up and continue on strong.

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Brainstorming hard. :)

This is the "Debris."

This is the "Mountain."

We finally got all the motors working and spinning right today. Huge success.

Building a Bot

We are making progress on building the drive train. Soon we will be ready to test drive it and see if it will climb the mountain.

Drive Train v. 1

Drive Train v. 2