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Hello, Robolions team members, mentors, friends, and community members! Welcome to "The Fourth Law of Robotics," home to University City High School's FIRST (For the Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) Robotics Team. We hope to use this blog to inform you about what we're up to.
We compete in the FRC (First Robotics Competition), an annual competition where we have six weeks to build a robot from scratch. This year's game is Recycle Rush. We'll post updates here to let you all know what we're up to with building (and competing with) our robot!
We also are now competing in FTC (First Tech Challenge), the next level down from FRC. The game was called Ring It Up!

Monday, January 16, 2012

Day 9 Update

It's been 9 days since we received the challenge for the 2012 season, and we have moved forward with much gusto. So far we have a chassis built, a board painted, some prototypes for the shooters and ball grabbers made,  ideas about how to set up the electrical system, and other various things done. With a small team again, it's difficult to get as much done as we would like in the time we have. But nevertheless, we're making progress.

As far as prototyping goes, we have just made a ball-grabber design that works really well, and we think we are going to use it. It's basically a 1 1/2" PVC pipe tube with 7 holes drilled all the way through. Surgical tubing (flouropolymer tubing) is looped through the holes, tied off at each end. The pipe spins over the balls and funnels them into the ball holder (which we still have yet to design.)

We actually got the idea from another team, who'd posted their video on YouTube. It was quite an inspiration and has worked much better than the ideas we had before!

In other news, the team has finals in school this week. Good luck to everyone!


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