February 6th, 2010: Day #29- Workday

February 6th, 2010. Day 29. The days are moving too fast. One moment it was week 3, and then I blinked. Low and behold, when I opened my eyes again, it was week 5. It feels too long ago we all met here for the first day, not knowing each other. Now, everyone’s best friends; bonding through every moment.

Working in the CAD room were the PR teams, David, and the various other members who would pop in to utilize a computer and the assorted programs on the aforementioned computers. David downloaded a pretty awesome program for slideshows. It’s even better than the one he got before, yet for some reason, when he uploaded it to the computer, he got about half-a-screen of corrupted code he had to read through and debug. Public Relations worked on Dean’s Homework. Our interpretation of the homework was to invite the younger students to visit the best FRC team in Blue Valley and check out what we do. They should be coming on the 9th of this month.

The rest of the team worked elsewhere. This would mean one of two places: The Workshop or the Programming Room.

In the Workshop, Jeff and his sub-teams were constructing the parts of the robot. Jeff, now that the frame of the robot got wielded, started mounting everything onto the real frame. What we’ve been using previous to this point were old chassis and prototypes we made. Currently, they (the components of the robot excluding the chassis itself) are bolted to the frame, but Jeff did the math and believes if he were to wield the pieces to the frame, he’ll shave off a whole 8lbs from the total weight. That will help tremendously with both making weight and hanging the robot. Sean Boeck, at first, was having trouble with his hanging mechanism. He’d hit a small snag with it not recoiling. Thus, redoing the end part, he got his rate of progress to change for the better.

Remember up two paragraphs ago when I said there were TWO teams working outside of the CAD room? Well, the other team consists of the programmers. They worked on getting the kinks out of the code they wrote, and, after learning the hard way, backing up the code. From now on, that’s how they’re starting each code, and doing it every 10 minutes.

Saturday went by fast, and suddenly it’s the gotten close to ship date.

Pictures of the day: