One Week Away

We are one week from the first competition on Saturday, December 12th. And, like any other team before a competition, we are scrambling to finish things up.

A lot has happened since the last blog post. First of all, we went to EIS and presented what we were doing with robotics and technology, and they took a great interest in FTC. They then proceed to pull a big check of $2,000 out of their pockets and give it to us. We are absolutely so grateful to them and all they've done for us!

Another thing that's happened is that we went to the Alpharetta Library and did a collaboration of presentations with the Chattahoochee team Taco Tuesday for kids and their parents.  The kids loved it and they got to drive the robots and ask questions. It was a amazing to see their faces light up!

We have created a scoring mechanism that is going to allow us to dump the debris into the buckets on the mountains. We've improved the wheels and their rubbery surfaces, and we've attached the hanging mechanism (the t-slot). These are some pictures and videos of how everything is working so far:

 

Sorry this wasn't a very long blog post, but we have a whole lot to do and only a short amount of time to write about it!

Major Progress!

It's been a while since we've updated, but a lot has happened since then! We've had major progress in getting up the mountain, and that's mostly because of a new type of wheel that we tried. When we removed the rubber from the normal wheels, it gave us lots of traction for grabbing onto the bars and propelling us forward.

We also received our T-slots that we're going to use as an arm to hang on the top bar of the mountain and also score debris! We put it together and it's working perfectly. We couldn't have asked for anything better right now.

On the topic of outreach, we went to Ocee Elementary school for their family science night. We taught them about FIRST, and what they do, and what FLL and FTC and FRC are like, and what the important aspects of all three are. The kids got to drive the robot, as well as a lego FLL robot, too. They really enjoyed it.We also hosted the Chattahoochee High School team in our garage so that they could use our field.

We also had a build day a few Saturdays ago, in which we went to a large gathering with other FTC teams where there was a full field where we were able practice, and try trial and error. This was where we had the robot get the highest then it had ever gotten. There's a video on that near the end of the post. ;)

Things are progressing quite nicely, and we learned that we are one of the few teams that have found a way to make it up the mountain that far and well. Hopefully our progress will only get faster and better, so we're keeping our fingers crossed as we continue to work.

Hosting the Chattahoochee High School Team

Experimenting with the wheels

Experimenting some more...

Our T-slot contraption :)

Ocee Elementary schoolers driving our robot

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