Well, the season is over for team 3723. But, we're not ending that soon! To get the Kingsland Community more involved the TeKnights plan to set up an evening when we display a newly built robot taken after 2013's season Ultimate Ascent. We still have our props and what not from that year and we can build a new robot off of the plans from our old bot. So, our main objectives of these next few weeks is to build a working bot that will shoot frisbees into set goals and having the robot pick up any frisbees that are lying on the ground.

We'll also be showing off Toast at this Robo-Night and we are considering allowing participants to drive Toast or the frisbee-bot (Name not available). Along with all this exciting new commotion, we might add in sometime to show and explain code to new-comers and people who are interested in such things. 


This event is set up to get the community involved, as well as recruit new members and amaze young minds. :)

Today is the LAST DAY to work on Toast. We're taking the whole school day to work on him and test drive in the gym. Yesterday,  we attached Toast's "arms", which'll be used for centering the totes and can for a simpler lifting.  We've got a good deal of the team down here. There's 8 members out of the 11 students that could make it today which is a pretty great turn out.
So, for today, to get ready for practice driving, we have to improve our pneumatics. We need to attach our plexiglass to the back of Toast and our corrugated plastic to the sides. Then, we plan to go through and rewire everything to make our robot look less like a hay bale. 

Today has been full of hustle and bustle! We started our meeting at 8am and it still isn't about to end! We've got our arms just about ready to be bolted on and we took off our hinges on our claw. We spent a lot of the day cleaning up wires and testing pneumatics. We've finished programming our XBOX remote to our pneumatic system.
And our shirts are over halfway finished!!!!!!:)

Toast is up an running with only a few technical difficulties. We're still building and programming, but we're getting closer to the finished project by the second! This year we've added an xbox remote to it all adding the necessity for a second driver. We've also got our camera working, so all that's left now is mounting it. We've hinged our metal platelet for picking up boxes on the front of the robot so that we'd be able to flip it back inside the robot before/after matches.

As we grow closer and closer to the deadline, "Toast" (the robot) is looking spiffier. We've got the chains on and working and he's driving pretty well! The team members are super stoked! Our freshmen and team rookies are really excited for competition. 
In case we haven't mentioned this before, we've decided to make our own team shirts! We're creative like that! Our shirts may not look as fancy as every other team's but we took a great deal of time with these and members seemed to have bonded over it.
Our art expert - Beana - is in charge of all of this and they turned out more impressive than any of us expected!

We created a shirt "system" almost:
A shirt of a specific color means that member has a specific duty on the team for competition
Yellow is for the members that have duties that are reserved in the pits
Green is for the scouting team members 
Blue is for our wonderful mentors!
And our ONLY Orange shirt goes to Team Captain!

I hadn't posted yesterday because of a slight mix up. But, here I am, and here's my post! So, to catch everyone up, we've successfully put the Garage door opening mechanism on toast. He's now up and working, we haven't tried driving since the robot's communication became limited. Right now team 3723 is on the look out for some plexiglass, and we're looking for a lot of it. 

We spent today posing for our team photo and changing our rail design. We've decided we're going to go with our garage door opener idea after all!  It works out better because our rails kept binding up. So, in this design, we'll have wheels instead of our sliders. 

Team 3723 is super excited for the competition of 2015! But our robot isn't all done. So, we've set up meetings for everyday from Wednesday 2/11 to Tuesday 2/17 excluding Sunday. 
Should be fun!!!
We'll have pictures to post on Tuesday.

This day was initially dedicated to welding but apparently, we ran into a few technical issues throughout the time spent. Our robot stopped communicating with our controls, so we took apart the wires on the Robot and  re positioned our electronics board for better organization. We've decided to keep clutter to a minimum, we're going to separate the electronics board between two levels.

Today we worked on many things and accomplished making what we are now referring to as our ghetto air compressor. As well as a couple of little additions to the robot that seem unimportant, but could really help us in the end. Our robot is coming along nicely but, just in case we falter, we've setup a slightly different backup plan that consists of practically all the same parts, but instead of the current sliding rails we are using we would incorporate the common garage door opener.So, in plan B we'd be using a chain rather than a pneumatic system. 

We're getting closer and closer to finishing as our Design as the deadline draws nearer. We have a crazy amount of work to do. We still have to run our chain, weld our lifting mechanism, figure out our positioning arms, and remount half of our electronics. On top of all that we have to get our programmers up and running on the programming side. So, we are basically meeting everyday as of Wednesday the 11th. All the way until Bag-and-Tag day on the 17th. So we will keep you posted.