Final Week of Slotbots

So this week was an interesting week for us. We almost had everything complete on Monday until a tap broke inside of one of our axles and made us have to get new materials to finish our bot. That setback caused us to lose the majority of our points on the MS for Monday.

Afterwards we just had to get our bot working correctly and since we already had the Monday MS we weren't as rushed. We spent time in the machine shop Monday and Tuesday to get things in working order. We realized at some point that one of our supplied gears was somewhat curved but there was nothing we could do at that point and just had to hope that everything worked ok with it.

Then on Tuesday we made our video and had a lot of fun with it. We didn't have great footage of our bot since my camera battery died while we were in the lab so we had to use a phone. But after a little effort we were able to get something that we really liked for our video.

Then Wednesday's seeding came around and we were one of many teams that was scoreless. It all came down to one mistake: we didn't account for the balls in front of our bot being squash balls. The balls stopped our bot dead in its place and we could not get far enough forward to flip the flipper and score. We had an idea how to solve this problem for Thursday's competition but we would have been 0.25" over the allowed dimensions. Thursdays competition again left us scoreless although we came very close to getting the flipper flipped and scoring. All in all it was a fun and productive week. Personal reflections coming soon!