Minnesota Weather – Ally L.
The weather on Monday was stormy and unpredictably rainy in the morning, but it was sunny in time for open room! However, we had not yet unpacked our robot Lefty from the trailer outdoors that we’d used to bring it to the IEEE demo. Given that Lefty had been rained on at IEEE, and we had no idea how much it had dried out given the humidity and rain, we did not work on Lefty at all this Monday. Hopefully, our robot is doing well after all of this moisture, but we don’t know yet. We brought Lefty indoors, but did not test it, in case there was still water in contact with any electronics in the robot.
Drift-sco Update
Drift-sco, the offseason project bot we’ve been working on (read the progress we’ve made in our first and second offseason open room blogs) is going well! On Monday, all that was left for the mechanical aspects of Drift-sco was adding motor keys and installing sponsor panels. We started with the motor keys.
Drift-sco was originally built using CIM motors, and on CIM motors, the shaft that rotates when the motor is powered is a cylinder. While this is very simple, we need a way to transfer that rotation, so CIM motors have motor keys. There is a tiny cutout on the side of the cylinder, and we wedge a tiny piece of metal into that cutout, and the piece is called a motor key. Then, whatever we are using to transfer the rotation just needs to have a circle with a small cutout, and it will fit. However, the motor keys that companies sell for this purpose are very easily lost, so we have to make our own.
Thankfully, they are tiny, so the metal we use to make them is very thin, and it is easy to use a variety of tools. Once we made the keys, we installed them in the little cutouts, and the motors were able to transfer the rotation to the mechanisms they needed to rotate.
Sponsor Panel and Code
We also reinstalled one of the sponsor panels this Monday. Sponsor panels, on a robot, display the team’s sponsors who made it possible to build the robot, and attend the competitions it competes at, and more. They can be simply decorative, to best show the company logos, but are often also protective, shielding some portion of the robot. On Drift-sco, we decided to reinstall its protective sponsor panel that helped keep all of the robot’s electrical components safe, as we were hoping to test the robot soon and did not want to damage the electrical components.
After this, the programmers worked to get Drift-sco up and running. However, there were some issues with pushing code to the robot, as well as strange issues with the motors. We aren’t really sure what is wrong, but there are so many issues on the software side with Drift-sco. This could be because the robot is over 10 years old. If any alumni have any ideas or experience about Disc-o’s software, feel free to reach out.
Outreach
A lot of the time in open room this Monday was spent on a variety of projects on the Business side – many of which were Outreach. The Outreach subteam is currently working on both preparing for the State Fair demo coming up and organizing our supplies for other outreach events.
On Monday, we finished officially entering our robot in the State Fair so that we could potentially win awards (we got 2nd place last year!). To enter the Fair, we need both our robot and an informational poster about it. We wanted color pictures for the poster, so when we found an old color printer hiding on a cart, we began trying to fix it. However, it was extremely old – it was on the same cart as some laptops with DVD players. We did not manage to fix the printer.
Outreach also worked on sorting Lego kits, which our FLL (First Lego League) teams use, which has been a huge project throughout the past few open rooms. We had approximately 20 Lego kits that we needed to have organized so that we could use them for events, and they are now all usable! Thank you to everyone who spent so much time organizing Legos; it will be extremely helpful.
Other Organization
While we sorted many Lego boxes on Monday, we also worked to organize the rest of the room. Everything from the old storage closet (which is where we found the Lego kits in our second offseason open room) got put away in the back of the robotics room. We also disassembled some of our old field elements to make space. Then, we cleaned out the closet in our room a bit, as it had gotten a bit messy during the summer. The room looks nice, and we hope to get it even more organized in future open rooms!
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