Today we worked hard on a variety of tasks. Some of us worked with sheet metal, laying out our parts according to their drawings.
Others worked on soldering components onto the new circuit boards that came in the mail from our sponsor Advanced Circuits.
We’re excited to have our name on our circuit boards!
On the other side of the room, we knitted away on our top secret knitting project. Little by little, it is growing, thanks to the efforts of many knitters!
More machining was done today at Queen’s University. We’re thankful to Queen’s for helping us get all of our machining done in such a short time.
Of course, when we have new parts, there’s going to be a lot of filing. Some of us are experts at filing!
Filing and Smiling
We’re working on assembling our chassis and getting wheels turning. To do this, we needed to get our chains the right length. Thank goodness for our pre-season chain lessons!
We cut pieces today for welding projects tomorrow. It takes a lot of planning to have everything done on time to be put together.
All systems are important. We don’t want to forget pneumatics! We’re investigating what parts we have, and what parts we need.
To help with our research, we examined the pneumatics from last year’s robot.
Despite the long hours and the chaos of week 5, we’re still smiling!It’s Remi’s birthday. He’s smiling too!
Happy Birthday Remi
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!
At 6:00PM we were excited to see so many people arriving to take part in our fundraising test. We had 52 people in attendance, which gets us approximately $1500 more for our trip to the Championships. Parents, friends, high school students from our school and others, recent graduates, Queen’s students, teachers, nurses, and even some Cyberfalcon mentors!
Other adventures of the day included a tube throwing competition in the courtyard since teams and the semi-formal were taking over the gyms. The courtyard is not ideal–it’s too small, but at least it’s not windy. We’ve had some pretty good throws.
Our bear mascot has a fan in the head now. We’re working on making sure that nobody’s hair gets caught in it! Safety first!
Our CAD crew has been hard at work and will continue to work all weekend long. Drawing deadlines are coming up!
Our teachers and parent mentors spent lots of time figuring out how to mobilize our team and get carpools to Toronto. 
We also need to manage team clothing for all going on the trip. Some of our teammates were very helpful and folded and packaged up the rest of the t-shirts that needed to be distributed before GTR. Now everybody can finish packing! If you don’t have your shirts yet, you can pick them up tomorrow at our meeting! 
We are excited to see some new iron rings in the room. Our fourth year Queen’s University engineering students received their iron rings this past weekend and were eager to show them off. Congrats to JNo, Kevin and Drew for their accomplishments!
