Wow! What a building season. The 2010 Foshay Robotics Team 597 Build season will go down in history as one of the most memorable, and challenging endeavors ever. We lost the machinist we used for 6 years and had to use a brand new machinist with no FIRST experience. Our engineers had major scheduling conflicts. Many of student team members were involved in Academic Decathlon, the Valentine’s Day talent show, the Soccer team, the school’s Marathon team, NAI program, Mayor’s Engineering Infrastructure Academy, and ISEE program. In addition we continued our Mission Science Program every Monday and continued to offer math tutoring to our elementary and middle school students 3 times a week.
We brained stormed week one. We debated several designs week two. Week three we finally got our two engineers, new machinist, and team members together and debated more over several designs. Week four, the engineers sent designs to us over the internet but the machinist thought it was too hard to build and would take much time to machine parts. We debated more on the design offer the internet, and on our cell phones.
Boy did we eat well. Louis’s mother, who works at a restaurant, brought us sandwiches 7-8 times during the build season (so much food that it would last two days). We ate pizza, had tacos and burritos about 4 times. And on those extra-long days (9:00am-3:00am) we ate out of the University’s vending machines. Many students learned how to use the drill press, table saw, circular saw, band saw, grinder, skill saw and other machines in the machine shop. We learned about the different motors and their rpms. We learned Cim motors are good for drive systems and shooting mechanism while fisher price motors, and window motors are good motors to use on accumulation systems. We also learned that direct driving of Banebot motors was not the best idea because the motors have a very high rpm (12500rpm) and tended to burn out on our shooter (we burned out 3 banebot motors).
Even though it was building season, we still had to continue our fundraising. We had several nacho sales, sold “healthy snacks” to our elementary and middle school students afterschool and Mr. Newhouse wrote the Motorola grant and the BP grant. We mailed out letters to local businesses and VIPs. Our recycling program was still active during the build season. We collected ink cartridges & old cell phones to have them recycled for money. Mr. Newhouse gave a presentation to NANDC and received a $5000 grant.
Week 5 & 6 we slowly put “Wolvie X” (our robot name) together. Wolvie X has both a lifting and kicking mechanisms. We also gave three robotic demonstrations, one of them during the Raytheon Engineering Challenge 2/18.09 and of course our annual “I Heart (3 Robotics Day” to our elementary, middle school and high school kids.
We will leave for the Salt Lake City Regional Wednesday 3/17/09 and return Sunday, 3/22/09. The Los Angeles Regional is March 25-27 2009 than it’s on to Atlanta…………………………………………………………!!!!!!!!
Go Team 597!
