Monday – Money! (we need)
Written By: William A
Building a robot is expensive, and we wouldn’t be able to do it without all our generous sponsors! Today, the sponsorship subteam headed out to local businesses to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Our team was able to make it to over 50 companies on our trip and were able to make many meaningful connections. If you are interested in becoming a sponsor, you can find more information here!
We were also able to have an outreach meeting where we discussed and planned our upcoming events: our rebuilt game introduction night we will be hosting in late February, and a potential science fair event we may attend as well. We also debriefed our school board event and how well it went.
Things were kicking into full swing on the build side as well, and this was a great start to a week of manufacturing parts for our robot! We were able to make lots of progress on the list of parts we need to start assembling.
Monday was a productive day on both business and build from reaching out to sponsors to cutting parts and having meetings back in room
Tuesday – Fabrication!
Written By: Naren B
To build a robot, we need parts. Over the past week, our Design and CAD team spent over 20 hours designing our robot, and now, we get to build it in real life! Yay! But to do that, we need to fabricate custom parts from our CNC router and process them so they don’t have sharp corners.
Later that night, we had our weekly team meetings, where we discussed our plans for the next week and progress on the robot so far. Tuesday was one of the best days we’ve had this season, with team members finishing the final design on the robot and actually getting some parts of it done.
Wednesday – Meetings!
Written By: Jamie F
On Wednesday, we had 2 business meetings: Sponsorship and Inclusivity. At the Sponsorship meeting, we discussed our Sponsorship drive we had on Monday and emailed the contacts for it. At the Inclusivity meeting, we discussed our team builders, planned more for our Women’s Panel, and worked on increasing awareness of topics of interest on our team. Also, we coded our intake subsystem, which was the last subsystem that we needed to code.
Thursday – Peak
Written By: Owen H
We didn’t have an open room this Thursday, so instead, I’ll be talking about the 3 best things in open room.
First, by far, are the snacks. We usually have a consistent supply of snacks within our supply closet, such as apples, cheese-itz, chips, etc., for Talon team members to eat throughout the day. These snacks are a lifesaver for late-stays in open room, keeping us energized throughout the evening.
The second-best thing in open room is Ferris. Ferris is the unofficial mascot of the coding language Rust, which we use to code our robot. A while ago, one of our adult mentors crocheted an absolutely beautiful Ferris model, with tiny little feet and black-button eyes. Ferris, in any form, inspires hope throughout all of Talon Robotics.
The third-best thing in open room is probably chair-bot. I don’t know much about chair-bot, except that it’s a robot with a chair attached to it. Chair-bot’s age is a mystery, but I’m pretty sure it can drink at this point. I don’t know where it came from, but I’m estimating that it just showed up, and we let it stay here.
I’ve seen it running a total of 3 times, all without a battery attached. I’m guessing that it’s just running on magic. I don’t want to question chair-bot on any of this, not because it can’t speak, but because it can.
In conclusion, the top three things in open room are the snacks, Ferris the crab, and chair-bot.
Friday – Progress!
Friday was a day of manufacturing for Talon!
We worked on parts such as swerve modules, our intake, and our turret. Our drivetrain was slowly beginning to come together as well, but wasn’t a major focus for the day.
Other members of our team worked on more virtual projects, such as CADing mounts for our limelights and programming for the robot.
We also began to 3D print parts necessary for the robot, such as crush blocks. The crush blocks are intended to sit within the metal tubing of our robot, preventing the metal from bending in on itself when we tighten screws.
Overall, Friday was a day of major progress in the building of our robot.
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