We’ve been meeting weekly during the past few weeks, each Wednesday night from 7:00-8:30pm. As usual, 8:30 becomes 9:00, and we get home after 9. It’s good that people want to keep working together and don’t want to leave when 8:30 rolls around. Also, students have been working a few hours at AndyMark from 4:00-6:00pm on the same night, earning money for their team costs. During these work sessions, 3 students assemble AndyMark products, or they kit up parts (woo! put screws in bags!). We at AndyMark will donate $10 per student, per hour worked, as long as they are productive. We get some good, focused, labor out of this, and the kids get fundraising and work experience. More importantly, we are getting to know the students. I’m excited to see them compete to see who can assemble the most wheels in 2 hours. Here is a pic from one of our recent meetings:
Much concentration going on here
Lately, our weekly meetings have been focused on building a robot for an upcoming off-season event in Indianapolis called the CAGE Match. This will take place on Oct. 15th (which is my wedding anniversary and also a big day for our students who are in band, but oh well, we’ll still compete).
We brainstormed a bit to create the design for this robot, and we came up with this fancy white board drawing:
Here is our robot concept for the CAGE Match
We have split into groups to build the robot. One group is working on the electronics and software, another group is building up a standard C-Base with some AM Shifters. Another group is working on the gripper design (This group contacted Meredith and John Novak of FRC team 16, Bomb Squad, asking them for their gripper design. Team 16 sent us their CAD for their entire robot! Thanks, Bomb Squad). Another group is working on an elevator lift system. This group is using the extrusion elements from AndyMark’s FTC field border, and it’s coming together pretty well.
A somewhat completed CAD design
During one of our meetings, Danielle Rush and Tim Bath came to visit us from the Kokomo Tribune. They interviewed team members and took some pictures. Yesterday, they put us on the front page of their newspaper! Thanks to Danielle for writing a great article.
This will help us recruit some local corporate sponsorship. We’ve got a meeting on Monday with Haynes International, so this article will definitely help. We have a presentation team working hard with our lead teacher, Craig Williams, on this presentation. It reminds me of a Chairman’s Award presentation, but this one is for money, resources and sponsorship instead of a nice award. Awards are good and all, but they don’t fund the team. Rachel and I were talking last night, and we think that this group is ready for our Monday presentation. One last thing we need to do is study up on Haynes. They have done great things (invented the automobile in 1894, invented stainless steel, create specialty metals, and other good stuff), so we need to do our homework. We all really want to put a very big version of this logo on our robot:
One last thing – we registered for FIRST within TIMS yesterday. I don’t know what our team number is yet, so we shall see about that. In the mean time, we need to build this robot.
