Now week five has come to an end and it is time to realize that we are in danger of not finishing the bot unless more than 3 people come during the weekdays. We have 4 days left to get everything built and working together with a lot to accomplish. On the bright side, things have been getting done lately.

The robot has been completely wired with the exceptions of 1 jaguar that we might pull off last year's kicker and the switches for the pneumatics. The side panels, apart from everything else, work perfectly and are very nice in terms of working on the robot.

The motor to drive the arm was attached, then we found out the one we were using isn't legal and had to modify the mounting bracket for a legal one. Long story (very long story) short, the motor was mounted with chain and we were able to test it. It didn't work and got extremely hot. We plan on using some springs to counter balance and just doing a hand test with the springs, the motor worked fine so we should be okay, but just in case have the motor in your prayers tonight because plan M doesn't look very good if it comes to that. I'd like to mention Brain on that idea because he came up with that a few weeks ago and now it's saving our rear ends so thank you.

The mini-bot, according to the team working on it, is done! Then 20 seconds later it was revealed that it wasn't done! The wiring still needs to be packaged but that takes priority way after everything else because we don't have to ship the mini bot. That's why everyone formally working on the mini bot is now working on the bumpers. Just to let everyone know, for the first time (at least in the last two years) we are going to make an effort to have easy to remove bumpers. The bumpers form 3 years ago were disassembled and are being reused since they are the right lengths.

The deployment is getting closer, but many things still have to be made and tested in order for it to work. It still is a pulley system using a cylinder and it should fire the mini bot extremely fast. This is probably the ting that is most behind right now so we need to get some hands on that soon.

The claw is the thing second most behind. We are only going to actuate one piece now because the components are a little large for both. The bottom piece was mounted though so I can say some progress was made.

As few other notes would be that we got last years robot back today, we had been missing that for a few weeks but it's home now. Also a few handles were mounted on the frame so we can actually pick the bot up as oppose to the last few years. Here is was needs to happen over the next 4 meetings (3 if possible so we can make sure nothing breaks while driving):
-add springs to arm to counter balance
-finish building deployment structure and mount
-finish mounting claw
-build and mount actuator for claw
-build bumpers
Everything here is barely off the ground so everything will also take all week. Unless someone is dying or you are about to flunk out of school, we need people to be there on Tuesday and Wednesday unlike the whole season has been going.