WOW! I can barely believe it’s already Week 5! Where has the time gone? I bet the time daemon ate it 🙂 As of Saturday, most of the sub-systems are complete with the exception of our hopper and climber. Below is 1 teaser photo of the robot & another of how well we can shoot. Also, there have been some major modifications to one of the items pictured, but you’ll have to wait to see what we changed!
 
Sunday
R&R day! Today we had fun driving around our practice bot in Howe Atrium since we didn’t receive our parts yet from Quality to build our sub-systems.
Monday
Today we got our parts back from Quality Manufacturing. We were excited to start fabricating our sub-systems. We also held a parents meeting that was pushed back from last Wednesday.
Tuesday
More assembly of our sub-systems made by Quality.
Wednesday
Some of our students attending STEM Day at the State House in Des Moines. You can read more about it in this blog post. We also got the last parts back from Quality today!
Thursday
Shooter & Hopper were being finalized today, along with other odds & ends.
Friday
We started trying out our finalized shooter. We got most of our frisbees in. Programmers were working hard tonight as well.
Saturday
We played with the shooter and dialed it in to make it perfect. We also shot high-speed video of our shooter mechanism to see how a frisbee goes through it so we can improve it.
Note: I’m sorry I’m not updating much on the programming side of the build team, but I am not involved in that portion as much. We have a drivable robot, and have had for weeks thanks to them! They are the most important component of our team and without them, we couldn’t have a successful driving and scoring robot. THANK YOU Programmers! (And yes, we will hopefully have a robot to you by next Monday or Tuesday!)
Today, Team Neutrino attended STEM Day at the Iowa State Capitol with part of our Ultimate Ascent robot. We talked with state lawmakers educating them about FIRST and the benefits of FRC. Also in attendance were our friends from Team 525 Swart Dogs and 4646 Des Moines CoLab along with FTC Team 6420 and several FLL teams. We hope that our state legislators recognize the importance and benefits of FRC and the other FIRST programs and hope they continue their support of FLL and FTC along with adding FRC to the list of programs funded through the Iowa STEM initiative. Special thanks goes out to Swart Dogs for their contributed photos to this blog post.
We continued work on our CAD and pretty much finalized it. Some of the kids continued to work on building the pyramid. We also worked on making parts for our drive train assembly.
We found out we aren’t very good button makers…. yet. We continued making parts for the drive train assembly. We started working with the Bridgeport CNC.
We continued doing pre-fabrication work on the Bridgeport. The VEX order was also sent in today. We began organizing our stuff.
We finished up our work on the Bridgeport. Fabrication of the chassis for both of our practice and competition bots were initiated and completed tonight, weighing in at a slim 35 pounds. We also a dance held here in the shop after we lost 3 of our fellow Neutrinos to their winter formal, which went successful I might add.
