Over the past four weeks, we have run into a few problems: bad weather, equipment breaking, and illness to name a few. Fortunately, we did not panic and remained on schedule through hard work and diligence. This week, we had another problem. We hoped that we would be able to power through it and stay on schedule, but it was not to be the case. At the beginning of Week 5, one of our co-captains got sick, so he had to miss the entire week. Just like when our Robot Lead was sick, we were able to manage without one of our co-captains, but it was not a fun situation to be in again.
In addition to illness, we also had a few difficulties with our cube collector and cube delivery system, which is an elevator. Early on this week, the main part of the elevator was mounted on our robot. All that was left was to finish building the carriage. Unfortunately, we messed up up that small, essential part at least three different times during its construction. Finally, after several lessons were learned, it was complete and ready for testing!
As we were testing the system near the end of the week, it unexpectedly came crashing down. Hard. Needless to say, that crash was disastrous, breaking and bending parts of the system. As a result, we had to fix parts of the system and completely reconstruct the carriage. We did panic a little at the prospect of having to rebuild the carriage because it took us so long the first time, but we changed the design and some of our best students working on it! The design modification will also be more durable and fix our problem with the cube collector, killing two birds with one stone. We are optimistic that we will have it finished before bag and tag! Looking at it even more optimistically, we are grateful that it broke now rather than breaking it at competition and trying to fix it then!
We have also been having some complications with weight. Some of the robot parts are quite heavy, so we have had to keep a close eye on our weight. A couple of times, we have had to make small modifications to keep within the weight limit. At the end of the week, we were under the limit, so we should be good!