The end of the build season is quickly approaching and we wanted to catch everyone up to speed. We’ve spent the past few weeks figuring out the game, coming up with ideas, and prototyping. This year’s game gave us a lot of variables to think about. Towards the end of January, we were still mainly in concept design and that was unusual for us. We decided around week three to host a design meeting with three other local teams (PantherTech, Iron Kings, and TechnoKats) so each team could share their ideas and get feedback on them. Many volunteers and mentors from these teams have also helped us build a life-sized model of the game field. It’s still not completely finished but we will make sure that it is available for other teams to practice with soon.
For the first few weeks, the team was split up into sub-teams: software, climbing, and shooting.
The software team has been working on testing limelight and ultrasonic sensors. They have also successfully written skeleton code for the “3 plus 5 autos.” There has been some testing going on with the Banner and Beam Break sensors.
The climbing group has spent a lot of time on CAD in order to determine which climbing mechanism works best for the endgame. Some of our ideas are shown below. The group has decided on a final design and is now working on building the climber.
The group in charge of the shooter mechanism built a working prototype of a wheel that would spin rapidly while collecting balls into sections and then they would shoot up out of the middle. This prototype had several issues that caused the team to make the decision to move on to another idea. The main problem with this design was that the wheel would only go a few rotations before the balls would get caught on the feeder wheels.
CyberTooth 
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