Our team would like to congratulate one of our electrical team members, Zack, for obtaining third place in the Extreme Redesign challenge. He redesigned the bottle cap, for more information please click the link below.

The Rochester Rally is a practice competition hosted by Penfield High School. All teams in the area are invited, and this year, they had record attendance – nearly 20 teams came to the Rally.

The day starts out with simple practice on the mock field, a chance for teams to test out their robots in the arena. The drivers get their first experience driving the robot on the field; shooting frisbees into goals, putting new frisbees into the robot at the feeder stations, and climbing on the metal pyramids.

Later, scrimmage matches are scheduled, and any team can enter a match when they’re ready.  Other teams scramble to take note of which robots can shoot well or climb fast, already strategizing for matches in the real competition.

In the pits this morning, the Panthers raced to attach our climbing mechanism to the robot. Once we were finally ready, we jumped on the chance for a practice match, and brought our robot out to the field – only to have our netbook run out of battery! Oops!

Once that situation was remedied, the Panthers’ drive team shot frisbees clear across the field. The robot was able to score only feet away from the loading area. Loading frisbees was a little messy, because our robot doesn’t have protective shields around it yet, but our robot was able to drive over the frisbees that landed on the ground. Near the end of one of the matches, our human player Eddie was able to throw a blue Frisbee into the pyramid’s goal. Some of the mentors hefted the robot during a practice intermission to test out the climbing mechanism with minimal damage.

We headed out at 4:30, the Rally chalked up to a great success. We were able to test our robot and work out some kinks, and everyone had fun.

Today the programming team tried to get the network up and running, fixed the communication system, and continued work on thew angle sensor.

The electrical team rewired some input wires and changed some of the speed controllers.

Tonight’s meeting was quite loud, as the mechanical team was testing out the Frisbee shooter and using the miter saws. They sanded the hooks of the climber to fit, and have been creating the framework and reworking the motor system. They also managed to finish salvaging our bumpers from the previous year. 

The electrical team created a spreadsheet to keep track of all their wires, and, after removing the electrical box, started creating labels for the box. They hope to have the box back in shortly.

The programming team was working on and testing the code with the robot, and are updating the code after finding a bug.

Two of our team members worked on creating and printing out this year’s pit brochures.

We voted on the logo again today, the Panther Head won the vote and will be our logo.

Attention anyone who wants to drive the robot:

At the very beginning of the meeting we had a quick regroup. All of the sub-teams (programming, mechanical, electrical, and web page) were asked how things were going for them. Each team gave a quick over view as to what was going on and then we broke up into our groups.

We have spent the past few days on finalizing our prototypes. Our shooter is almost working just needs a few tweaks. Our ball intake system has been decided on. The programmers have continued working on the vision system for the robot. And the group working on the climbing system have started their prototyping.

We continued prototyping the ideas for the shooter and the intake system. The two groups joked with each other that the their part didn't need to work if the others didn't. The group working on the prototype shooter launched some of the flying discs.

There was another small group working on how to get the robot to bring itself off the ground.

Today we began making our prototypes and planning out parts. There was a group that created our Frisbee intake system out of cardboard.