Approaching the End

With less than one week remaining until the Balltower 3 competition, our efforts in creating a competitive robot design are coming to an end quickly. We have been in the shop everyday this week and it looks like it will be a crunch in the final days of preparation. Today we created a document that has a remaining to do list of all final items that will guarantee the completion of our robot. You can see the mockup of our robot below and we are looking forward to finishing up and hopefully we can successfully complete our strategy during the competition. Get ready teams!

Shop Work

In recent times, the Serging Sophisticates have been in the lab and machine shop constantly working on the machine and making improvements when need be. We are learning to become comfortable with, and use the Mill, Lathe, and Laser Cutting Device. With a box shaped radio controlled automaton, we have been using the Mill more than anything.

The mill has proven to be a very important tool in machining our device. We have been able to use it to create our MCM hooks, side panels, and other pieces along the way. We have also taken a lot of advice from Bob and Mark in the machine shop in operating the machines and figuring out the most efficient ways to make parts. The machine should come out well.

Weekly Meetings, Planning

One of the problems we noticed in our early team meetings, there were frequent time conflicts, with at least one person having to leave early or come late every time. We decided to put our feet down collectively and set a time for us all to commit to being at each week, Sunday 2:30-4:30.

We've done this for the past few weeks and had pretty good success with our planning. Two things that came out of this were (1) creating to-do lists for our lab section the following day, which has allowed us to better utilize our lab time on Mondays, and (2) being able to sign up for shop time better.

Another planning measure we've taken is making our own form of a Doodle using a Google Spreadsheet, to figure out when the most people can get in for shop time. That way we can know what shop times work for us and sign up as soon as they open. The last two weeks we've used this to have somebody doing something on the project almost every day.

Start of Robot Manufacturing

So this week Team Power Serge started manufacturing components for our MCM, our pulling hooks. We spent a few hours on the mill with some tube stock and angle stock. By Wednesday of next week, 11/14/2012, Power Serge should have our MCM fully manufactured. On another positive note, since the exam for 250 is now over, our team should have more time to focus solely on the manufacturing of our robot and preparing for competition. More pictures and progress to come soon.