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.
Week 4 Updates
Update: Talk about our teaser with us on Chief Delphi. Share your thoughts & join in on the guessing!
Sunday
A wonderful horrible winter storm hit today. A few people made it into the shop today to continue work on fabrication.
Monday
This morning Aren sent in our CAD parts to be fabricated by our amazing fabrication sponsor, Quality Manufacturing! Quality Manufacturing is a GREAT company that not only is sponsoring us this year, but they also picked up the newly formed Ankeny Team #4646 as well. We can’t thank you guys enough for all you do! We made the frisbee pick up mounts and prototyped our alignment system. One of our members also loaded the rest of our belongings that were in Christy Hall into their car.
Tuesday
Today we mounted our electronics on our practice bot, along with unloading our stuff from the member’s car into our storage area. Alex, Bojun, and David continued designing parts for Kraken in MasterCAM that were made on the CNC.
Wednesday
Iowa’s wonderful horrible winter weather hit last night again, leading to freezing weather today and a snow day for everyone except the parents. There were about 3 people working on assembly today.
Thursday
We started mounting electronics on our practice bot, along with finishing up assembling drivetrain modules.
Friday
Things have been really coming together! Tonight we ran on caffeine until 10. We got the practice bot up and running along with the basic pneumatics working! It’s so nice to have an awesome practice bot! We also mounted the speed controllers as well.
Saturday

Wow! Today was a busy day in Boyd Lab. We finished mounting and running most of the electronics that we could for our drive train on the competition robot. It’s getting exciting! We really shortened things up this year to make them super nice. We also started prepping pneumatics & running some tubing as well. We can’t wait to get our parts back from Quality to construct Kraken, shooter, and the other systems we have. Our goal is to have the competition robot complete by the end of next week. Included is a “teaser” of our robot of our beautiful wiring that we have completed so far. The pyramid is almost complete as well. Until next week, go teams!
Week 3 Updates!
Good morning, or afternoon, or night, or whenever you’re reading this. If you are on an FRC team, hope your team is doing well. We are doing pretty well ourselves.
Monday
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.
Tuesday
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.
Wednesday
We organized the shop today and moved our stuff into a storage area across the street in Black Engineering.
Thursday
We continued doing pre-fabrication work on the Bridgeport. The VEX order was also sent in today. We began organizing our stuff.
Friday
We got our master order sent in tonight. Fabrication also began today of our drive train, which we got 9 modules mostly assembled. We also got our hood latches for the bumpers. Work on Kraken also began.
Saturday
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.
Week 2 Updates (Days 8-19)
Hello!
Nice to see you again! This week we have been extremely busy.
Saturday
We split into several teams. One team CAD’ed, another team prototyped the pickup mechanism, and another prototyped the shooter mechanism.
Monday
We continued CAD’ing, prototyping, and strategizing for the rest of the week. The electronics/programming team also met and were practicing programming.
Tuesday
We held a team meeting that went pretty well discussing regionals and other team things as well.
Friday
We started importing the drive train/chasis into MasterCam then we started CNC’ing it. There was a team that started practicing welding. Another team also started building the field (pyramid/feeder slots)
Saturday
We did outreach at the ISU FIRST LEGO League State Championships from 9-12. Check back later this week for the post about that. Once we got done, we continued importing the rest of the drive train/chasis into MasterCam then finished CNC’ing them. Another team started detailing the CAD models of the specific modules we are putting on our robot. A few people continued work on the feeder slots.
Iowa State FIRST LEGO League Tournament Outreach
Hello!
Just wanted to update all of you about Saturday. We are going to be in 1071 Black Engineering from 9-12. We will have our Rebound Rumble robot there!
If you can’t make it, follow us on twitter for live updates along with checking back here later for photos. Also, check out the LIVE Video Feed on Saturday from the event!
Here are additional files:
Program
Judging Schedule
Robot Schedule
Outreach Schedule
Outreach Description



