The Grand Finale [Week 6]

Today marks the last weekend until "Bag Day" (for those of you who don't know, Bag Day is the final day for us to make modifications to the robot. At 12 at night, you put your robot in a massive plastic bag and can't touch it until your next competition). Thanks to a four day weekend, we still have all day of Monday and up until midnight after school on Tuesday to bag and tag it.

The past week has been full of little nasty surprises. On Friday, a wrong button press on our custom button panel shot out a ball from our intake and hit the panel, breaking it's connector (we fixed it quickly, but it still gave the computer engineering team a small heart attack). We also discovered that we were putting too much stress on the motor driving our lift, and therefore required us attaching a second motor to help distribute some of the pressure.

This year we are incorporating a new style for our robot's electronics board, which is a removable type to help us better work on it if something goes wrong. We wired up the whole robot to the board today and ran it, only to find that one of our motor controllers was not acting correctly. We switched that controller out for a working one, then only to have one of our motors snap the shaft it drove.

Nevertheless, we managed to repair all of the mechanical issues and got to hit our half-field for some driver practice and mechanism testing for about two hours. The coding team knocked out a few bugs and glitches, while pairs of our team took turn driving the bot.

Overall, we're well ahead of schedules prior to this year, and we have a pretty great robot that we've put together in the past six weeks. We'll test and build until the last second to knock out the remaining bugs and failure points, but it looks like we're in a pretty good position for competition. We look forward to our first district event to show the metroplex what we can really do.

Well, that's all for today. This installment is the last of our weekly updates, so keep an eye out on your Facebook timeline or Instagram feed for our bi-weekly up dates. We'll see you next time!

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The 5242 Media team will keep you up to date on progress here, on our website, with now bi-weekly updates.