End of Week 2

Next week we all have finals, so no one will be working on the robot until Wednesday afternoon. That being said, a small group of us managed to come in today and finish up some stuff before we have to take a break. We now have a drive train set up with encoders so that our programmers can get to work on programming some PID. We also finished up our prototype grabber, which works great, but is far too long (30+ inches). At the moment we have one pneumatic that performs two functions on the grabber, so we're going to replace that with two pneumatics, which should decrease the stroke lengths/pneumatics lengths.

One of our minibots went up the tower in under 10 seconds, with actual speeds being between ~5 and ~7 seconds, counting a little deployment time. The actual deployment mechanism will change that, but I have confidence that we should make it up the tower in under 10 seconds. At the moment, we're unsure about how to get the minibot down (we aren't using the NXT). We also thought a little more about the elevator, and then decided to leave it for Wednesday.