I honestly feel sorry for anyone who wasn't there tonight. We got the robot driving around and working.

Now the next time you see Barry, I want you to go up to him, give him a hug, and say thank you because he has saved our team. The counter balance was looking very hard to do with weight and just as hard with a spring and both would have took time, but Barry spent his day building the counter weighted spring that is adjustable. Now the arm has a full range of motion. The only problems are that the motor was overworked and got extremely hot(which can be fixed by tension of the spring). It was only overworked because people were unfamiliar with the controls and had the arm extended while trying to move it. Just to let everyone know, there is no reason to move the arm while it is extended and it is a very bad idea to. Only the top row of pegs need to have the arm extend to reach them so anything else is just pressure on our motor.

Anyways, the claw was mounted with the motor. Unfortunately, it isn't wired yet so we couldn't control that yet. But just hooking it straight to a motor worked very well and it has a death grip on that tube. The trick in wiring it is that the wires have to extend out which there is already a clear plan on how to do it.

The motor to extend the arm was wired through a difficult process of soldering inside the arm. But as I mentioned before, it works.

The bumpers are making decent progress, but need a team of people to work on them for the next few days in order to have them ready at the scrimmage. Personally, I'm not worried and it will be great to have them easily removable.

So over the next few days, all we need to do is tweak and build the bumpers since the deployment will not be ready by ship date meaning it doesn't have priority. The tweaks include adding a tensioner to the chain driving the arm, adding limit switches, adjusting the spring, changing speeds on motors, and overall making a more efficient bot. We still would like people to come if they can to make these small changes and so that people can try driving the robot around to provide feedback to the programmers on what needs to change. Here is the list:
-Wire the claw
-Add tensioner to chain on arm
-Tension and permanently mount spring
-Finish Bumpers
-Add limit switches
-Modify accordingly
-Finish deployment (not necessary but would be great)
-finish packaging on mini bot
-Add sponsors on robot
-Name robot
What a night FIRST 443!

P.S. I just had to make the list longer with a whole bunch of little things haha.