This week K-Botics would like to welcome JKL‘s continued sponsorship of our team at the silver level.
We’d also like to welcome Endetec as a new Bronze level sponsor.
With more welding comes more filing–It will be an exciting day when all of these pieces form a robot!
Our bumpers got their angle today…
Our chains are being tensioned…
Our chairman’s team had a brainstorming session…
Our programmers worked hard on getting the vision system working, and also getting our old robot for try-outs ready to drive in various configurations.
Our super-top-secret project is continuing to grow larger every day…
…and we’re bending a whole lot of Lexan. 
We’ve got some little jobs around here perfect for some little fingers! We’re glad to have little friends come and work with. 
Although our team is feeling the time crunch, we’re still looking out for each other. There’s always time for a hug!
Meet chain-man, a new friend of our team. Chain-man was created when we dismantled our drive train for what must be the 10th time. Each time we reassemble it, we realize that something’s missing. We’re getting a lot of practice which will be very valuable for our pit crew!
Our team has no machine shop access at school, so we’ve had to get lots of work done via our sponsors. We want to thank Transformix Engineering, one of our gold level sponsors, for helping us out with machining and welding today. We do have access to a bending machine at school, and we’ve been working with Lexan to make various robot parts. We need to carefully lay out the pieces, then cut them out.
After we cut the Lexan, we need to file it smooth, and then we put it in the bender.
We’re working also on our electrical system. Thanks to Kraftwerk for bending our electrical box for us this year. We’ll be installing our components and wiring things over the next few days.
We’re grateful to parents and families who continue to support us as we work long hours building robots. Tonight we were fueled by quiche and ice cream sandwiches. Delicious!
Others worked on soldering components onto the new circuit boards that came in the mail from our sponsor 
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!
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!
We put duct tape on the aluminum to make sure we didn’t file away our robot!
With wheels and sprockets on, we attached our chain.
Pretty soon, this robot’s going to be driving!
We’re working hard to get all the needed parts to fit nicely within the frame. Sometimes those parts need a bit of filing too.
Some of the parts needed a little bit more work. A few sparks flew!
In other news, our circuit boards arrived from Advanced Circuits, so we got straight to work soldering on various components.
It’s precision work, but when done with friends, the assembly line process is lots of fun.
Another fun job is bending Lexan. We worked with a heat gun and bent various robot parts. It takes a lot of muscle power to make bends with large pieces.
Programmers are working hard with the cameras and other sensors. We’re all going to be excited to get our hands on the 2012 robot to test out the code for real!
For now, we’re using our 2010 robot for drive testing. We are dealing with a real opportunity for trouble shooting as we often need to fix bits and pieces.
We want to thank our school principal for the wonderful pizza dinner. It’s great to have such support from our school community.
After a long day of machining, our trusty mentors need some well deserved nap time. We might need to make our nest again soon.
It’s going to be a long day tomorrow. Be prepared to stay late. We’ll see tomorrow if we need to do that.
Programming needed a little tweaking to make the robot easier to drive.
It takes a little time to get used to the controls….
…and then it takes intense focus to drive the robot without hitting the cones. We saw a lot of promising drivers today! We’ll keep practicing, and have some driver tryouts in early February.
We’re organizing all of our tasks on our big organizational chalkboard. There is so much to do!
We’re working on our CAD drawings still. We’ve got lots of part drawings to get done before we can manufacture all of the parts. 
We’re prototyping various devices to manipulate the ramp. To make it more fun we split up into two teams (girls vs. boys) and had a competition.
We’re planning and measuring and cutting material carefully.
We’re working together, mentors and experienced team members are showing our rookies how to work safely.
It’s exciting to see our designs work well! Even if our designs don’t work well, we can learn from that.
We also get to meet family members…
…and welcome them into our big purple family. Family members love Tweedles as much as the rest of us!
After dinner we kept working on our prototypes for ramp manipulation. When tested on the ramp, the boys’ prototype was definitely the loudest, but the girls’ seemed to be a little more effective. Good work girls!
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.
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award brainstorming breakaway build season bumpers CAD Chairman's Report communication community competition construction Cyber Falcons dance demo design electrical families field field trip First Robotics FLL FRC fundraising GTR kick off Logomotion Machining media mentors New York City Regional organization pre-season challenge programming prototype Queen's University rebound rumble safety scouting sponsors team building testing thank you Transformix video WAFFLES
