Today we gathered at Transformix Plant 2 to work on our shooter calibration and to watch the webcasts for the week 1 regionals. 
Congrats to our friends FIRST Team 772, Sabre Bytes who were winners at the Smoky Mountain Regional!
Today was Alex’s birthday, so he got to wear our fancy tiara to celebrate.
We’re starting to really notice the time passing. Some of us are feeling the time crunch! There are only 5 more days until we are competing in Oshawa, and we’re still working on some critical components. We’ll figure something out in the nick of time!
Our skills at vacuum forming chain guards is increasing by the day. We made another mould today, and will work on our final moulds tomorrow. Thank goodness for all the Timbits consumed today. We needed the cardboard to help stabilize the styrofoam!
Between designing, scouting, programming, shooting, and vacuum forming we got pretty hungry. Pizza sure was delicious! Speaking of food, K-Bots: if you have not yet put in your food order for Oshawa, you need to contact Colleen.
While we ate, our new friend the Roomba helped clean up some of our carpet. It’s mesmorizing to sit and watch it move around and around.
Come see the Roomba and the rest of the excitement at the warehouse tomorrow from 10AM-6PM. Bring your own food!
After a few jokes about exercise and eating vegetables, we started having a serious discussion about how to reduce our robot weight. It seems that this time of year, we’re always trying to reach that magic number of 120 pounds
To do this, we’re going to be drilling a lot of holes, and making some tough decisions about what can remain on our robot. Some mentors have done calculations about just how many cheeseholes it takes to lose a single pound. Others speculated that shortening wires would make a similar difference. “4 inches of wire equals 1 cheese hole” -Kevin H. [we haven't seen the proof yet]
We drilled and deburred a lot of aluminum. “Deburring is a pain in the arm!” said our little helper.
We even cut holes out of our Lexan panels.
We’re investigating where it’s possible to take weight out of our electrical box. With a bit of finesse, we might just squeak by under the weight limit.
As we’re removing some components, we’re adding others. It’s a balancing act, deciding which features are necessary and which are extra.
Between discussions and machining, we took some breaks to complete homework and study for tests.
We also got a great head start on organizing our scouting binder for GTR East.
We completed the first phase of our super-top-secret project…
…and we ate a great spaghetti dinner.
It was really nice to have a special visitor join us on his 13th birthday!
We’ve already started packing up some of the essential tools.
Our orders have been coming in so we’re unpacking boxes, and moving forward with our plans. The biggest excitement came when boxes of electrical components were unpacked.
In other great news, we got some machining done today! Thanks to our Queen’s mentors who spent lots of time in the shop and accomplished so much.
When the pieces came back to our work room, we deburred…
There’s more machining to come in the next few days. Here’s another cool part that we’re using for our robot. 
Does anyone know what it is?
“The muffins are SO DELICIOUS!” -Liam, grade 9
After snack time we got back to work putting together the wheel assemblies for our robot. Working together is always more fun!
We got to work on our top secret project
A few snips later and it looked like this.
Some more secret business involves our strategy for flipping the bridge down. We’ve been working for a few days to develop a good idea. Today we moved our sketches onto CAD.
Some shenanigans took place repeatedly today. Over the course of the evening almost everyone ended up trapped at one time or another. Here’s proof that even a Tweedle can get caught! Despite being caught, the Tweedle is still smiling!
Part way through our work session today we took a time out to learn about talking with the public, particularly to judges and to the media. We are lucky that CKWS TV, our local TV station is interested in following us through build season, checking in from time to time, watching our robot grow and develop, and watching us come together as a team.
We look forward to the opportunity to share FIRST Robotics with the rest of Kingston!
The test chassis got used again by our programmers to test some code.
4. Tweedles can knit!
We’re getting a second driver station up and running so we can have drive practice before we hold tryouts later in the season. 
We had a really big CAD party and at the end of it our virtual robot is almost finished… Oh my gosh, it’s just like Tron!
We’ve continued working on a top-secret knitting projects, and we’ve started some hats for some of our newer members.
Our programmers have been working very hard, using our test chassis to decide how the controls will be laid out.
After modifying things, it’s really fun to drive the robot around!
We held a meeting right before lunch to discuss our latest outreach activity… we’re going global! After our meeting we ate a delicious lunch. Thanks parents for keeping us so happy and healthy! We couldn’t survive our hectic build season without your support.
After lunch, we split up into groups to work on various tasks that needed to be completed before the end of today.
…While others worked on CADing various parts of the robot, including the drive train and some other ideas we’re working on.
We’ll meet next at the usual time after school on Monday. Enjoy your day off to relax and do your homework!
Today we got the bridge done
We build Saturday from 10AM-6PM.
The field’s barrier was finished today! The field makers have been making excellent progress so far and we are very eager to see the completed field.
