When FIRST says plan for weather to interrupt build, weather really happens. Due to heavy snow and cold weather Jan. 22-23, we didn’t have access to our shop after-school and then had a snow day due to 12” to 14” of snow! Snow, combined with semester finals, curtailed all of our regular robot-build and programming hours. However, even after all of the complications this week, our 2018 robot (nicknamed ZZbot) has a moving and completed drivetrain, a solid collector mechanism, and a ramp mechanism that is rolling from prototype into its final iterations.
The lift mechanism is nearly completed; we just need to add a winch and components to go along with it, and we will be able to get it mounted to the robot. This week, we have also been working a lot more in computer-aided design (CAD), which has made things a lot more accurate, slipstreamed the process, and has made robot build much faster.