Week 6 was spent getting everything ready before for the end of build season. During this week, our main goals were to finish all mechanical aspects, which needed quite a bit of work, and spend time calibrating our code.

While we were able to learn from last year’s mistakes and improve our lift mechanism by making it stronger, we made a mistake in the fabrication of it. As a result, it ended up slightly crooked. Fortunately, we were able to fix the unevenness during this week, and the lesson of “measure twice, cut once” was reinforced to us!

Eventually, the robot reached the point where we could test our code. In doing so, though, we found a few mechanical problems. With less than a week left until the end of build season, this caused quite a bit of concern. Instead of panicking, however, we evaluated the situation and set to work.

The day before Bag and Tag, we were able to have a longer meeting because it was a Teachers’ Work Day. Because we were quite behind in the design and fabrication of our collector mechanism, we used the longer meeting to work on it extensively. We made good progress and got it to a decent place, but we knew there was still quite a ways to go.

On Bag and Tag, we met at a student’s garage after finishing up a few things at Magrathea, our build space. There, we had a few of the field elements and much more room for us to test our robot! The space was also conveniently located as it was only 5 minutes away from our build space.

At the garage, our Drive Team got practice with our collector and endgame mechanism while our programmers were able to adjust the presets as needed. After testing for a couple of hours and noting what worked well and what needed to be improved, we bagged and tagged our 2019 robot, Deep Thought!

Over on the business and marketing side, we continued to steadily make progress! The new pit banners got printed and are now pit ready with the grommets put in them, and the computer stickers we designed were printed and cut out in order to give them out at competitions. We also submitted our team avatar, made more bumper hats, and finished up our robot cart design. The light-up cubes on the robot cart now have hand-drawn designs in them, and the new side side panels got printed and added to the robot cart.

Overall, it has been quite an eventful build season, and we are getting super excited for our first competition at the Wake County District Event on March 8-10!