Nobody puts Miss Daisy in the corner, but we can definitely put her in a bag. On Tuesday night, we essentially suffocated our robot. As morbid as that may seem, shoving Miss Daisy into a plastic bag represents the end to our 6 week long “pre-bag” build season. In the days prior, we worked to shave some weight off of Miss Daisy. By that, I mean we threw her into a sauna and told her to sweat it out. Spoiler: it worked. In reality, the subsystems switched out some of the heavier materials, making sure that the shaving of weight didn’t compromise their mechanisms. Many were told to kill their darlings, but that’s the price you have to pay for a lean robot.
After the subsystems accommodated for weight changes, programming had some time to test out the robot. Needless to say, some parts of the robot got cronched. This, of course, is a natural step in the process of making Miss Daisy as great as she can be. The programming team has to figure out what is wrong before they can fix it, and sometimes that entails a bit of destruction. However, when our team gets to unbag the robot, the mechanical subteam will fix these problems. Unbag time will be organized chaos as the various subsystems work to put some final touches on their mechanisms. As you’ve all learned from previous blog posts (ahem…week 2), organized chaos is the best way to get things done, so it’s not a big deal.
When Miss Daisy finally got to run on her own power, the electrical subteam was able to figure out if they made some mistakes while wiring the robot. There are a lot of wires in there, and I would get confused braiding pieces of string, so I sincerely applaud their hard work.
While the Build/Design subteams did their thing, the Strategy subteam worked to finish up their scouting sheets. These papers help our team to organize the attributes of other team’s robots, and help to pick alliances. With the variety of ways to score points, this was quite the task, but they managed to pull through.
With Miss Daisy looking thin as ever, and all of the subsystems attached, we stowed away this beauty in a luxury plastic bag. I mean, it doesn’t sound super luxurious, but is there really a way to spice that up? Just picture a see-through Louis Vuitton bag, because that’s definitely what we put her in. It was the only bag worthy of her greatness.
