We’ve passed the halfway mark in this year’s build season, and our team’s drive base has been sent to our fabrication sponsor! Although this marks a large step towards getting ready for competition, there is still much work to be done to ensure all of our subsystems have been tested and finalized for robot assembly. Our team has been testing our designs on homemade field parts that were quickly built by an amazing parent crew. For now, it’s a race against the clock to get our subsystems in order before it’s time to integrate.
When it comes to making a sturdy, fast, and efficient robot, we must ensure that only the best prototypes make the cut. Our control panel manipulator has three prospective alignment mechanisms, all of which are being evaluated. The subsystem is planning a large meeting with interested students and coaches to finalize a design by the end of the weekend.
Many of our subsystems have moved on to refining their current mechanism ideas after exhaustive testing. Most recently, our hanger group began using weights to measure their attachment device’s strength against both impulse and prolonged force. Unfortunately, we saw our hook prototype begin to break during this process, leaving us looking for ways to improve the design before it is time to integrate with the rest of the robot. Luckily, recent measures to overcome these setbacks seem to be moving in the right direction.
Programmers have had time to improve their code over the past two weeks, though there have been a 
few issues. Our control panel programmers have come to a bit of a standstill, as they cannot move forward until the build team has established which alignment mechanism we want to use on our final robot. That being said, lots of headway has been made within the vision targeting group. Recently, they’ve been calculating the distance between our robot and the targets, allowing for consistent power cell scoring. Now, programmers are working hard to finalize some code before the drivebase comes in from our fabrication sponsor, CCC. Although it is crunch time for many of our subteams, the advancements we’ve made these past two weeks are ones that set our team up for a great season.
