The third week of the LigerBots build season has everyone excited because we can see our robot beginning to take shape! Team members are hard at work all around the workshop, trying to beat the time crunch. With half of build season already over, our work has to accelerate for us to finish the robot on time!

We have started making the robot chassis, which will be an H-drive. Our precision machining will help to make the frame just right!

Many parts are being created for the robot’s elevator mechanism that will lift the ball (“cargo”) and disk (“hatch”) game pieces.

We also made a second, more primitive, elevator that will allow our programmers to test automatic alignment of the elevator to the field element goals.

Our students dedicated to robot vision wrote code that will make the robot automatically align to acquire the playing pieces from the feeder station.

A group of students, mentors, and alumni tested the game piece intake and discussed how it can be improved.

We finished our mockup game-piece loading station, which will allow us to test the acquisition of game pieces by our robot. We have almost finished our mockup of the rocket ship field element, which will allow us to test placement of game pieces from our robot into the goals.

Our electrical group is hard at work soldering wires from the new NEO motors so that they can be used on the robot. We used duct tape and zip ties to make the assembly as neat as possible so that when we need to put it on the robot, we know what connects to what. We are also wiring an electrical test board. Solving electrical problems now will enable rapid wiring of the actual robot once we are ready to do so.

This week our Chairman’s award group revised our essay. We are almost done writing answers to the executive summary questions, and are starting to lay out a plan for their oral presentation.

The graphics group has just finished its preliminary design of our “Destination: Deep Space” pit banners and will now turn our attention to the Chairman’s award submission booklet, which contains our essay as well as information about every aspect of our team.

The LigerBots strategy council calculated the LigerBots standing in FRC by various criteria this week, corresponded with Israeli FRC team Glue Gun and Glitter (whom we are mentoring on game strategy and scouting,) and worked on our speaking skills to communicate better with FRC judges.

We had our weekly build-season team dinner and Saturday lunch, thanks to our dedicated parents.

Only three more weeks to go in our build season!