Today there was a very exciting delivery that came to our school from Levac Supply and Kleton who gave us a very good deal on new furniture for our workroom.
We unloaded a truckload of boxes and carried them upstairs.
There’s not a lot of space in room 107 anymore! All of the old furniture is on one side of the room, and the new furniture is being assembled on the other side.
As we unpacked the boxes, some of us decided it would be fun to hide out inside.
Some of us weren’t so good at hiding.
Our bin racks are looking really great. We’re going to know where everything is soon!
There’s another storage rack for the wall. 
We started putting together the workbench frames. With a little teamwork it became an easy job.
Most of us are pretty skilled at assembling things with nuts and bolts.
Others resort to hammers to make pieces fit.
“I’m going to use a hammer, because my name is Kevin” -Mr. Wood
We are currently having a $5 old team shirt sale. There are limited sizes and styles available–first come first served.
With all of the assembly happening in our workroom, we ended up with a lot of boxes, which we stacked in the hallway.
Our stack of boxes quickly was transformed into the most incredible box fort that we’d ever seen. 
The fort was ruled by a king, queen, court jester and a horse. They survived and thrived, expanding their kingdom halfway down the hallway. They defended their realm against enemy clans, and maintained peace until it was time to collapse the boxes to be recycled.
After school many parents volunteered to drive us to Transformix Engineering where we ate snacks and did homework….
…and worked on programming the robot….
…and finishing up the wiring.
Thanks so much to Transformix for letting us use their space for the weekend and letting us bag and tag tonight. We’re making ourselves at home! There are Queen’s jackets everywhere!
We had a few visitors come to see the last exciting moments where our robot was driving around and shooting baskets. It’s really thrilling to see everything come together at the last minute and work like it was supposed to!
Chris, from FESTO, was excited to see the pneumatic components in action. He’s arranging FESTO giveaways for competition this season.
We also had our follow-up with CKWS TV. It was exciting to have media present for the final moments of our build. Bag and Tag was officially documented this year, and a two part series about our team will air Monday and Tuesday at the 6pm news on CKWS.
One minor hiccup that we had to negotiate before bagging the robot was our bumper design. After recent clarification our original split number bumper was deemed to be against the rules. We quickly made some patches to sew on. 
There were still plenty of people taking naps on the sidelines…It will take time to regain all of the lost sleep from recent days.
With 30 minutes to go, we separated our shooting device from the robot to hold back and work on over the next little while. Thank goodness for a withholding allowance!
There was great hustle near the robot, and also in the Transformix lunch room. We cleaned up all of our dishes and food and prepared for the excitement of putting the robot into the bag.
But first…we needed to weigh our robot. Using the bathroom scales gave us one estimate…
…Transformix’s industrial scale gave us another….
With a 20 pound shooter, we’re under weight! 
We gathered at 11:50 to bag our robot. Everyone wanted to be a part of the momentous occasion.
It’s all caught on film!
With a sigh of relief and a few cheers we were done, with a few minutes to spare!
It’s a strange feeling to be done building. We’re used to seeing each other every day, and now we’ll take a day to rest and recover before we start thinking of all that remains to be completed before going to competition. 
We’ll miss each other in the mean time though! Good work everyone. Thanks to all of our families and supporters for helping us through an intense 6 weeks. Enjoy your rest.
…and some robot weighing….”uh oh!”…
….we then discussed where we could drill more holes to lose those 2 extra pounds…
Many thanks to Allan from Transformix for volunteering his time to help us in the machine shop today. In the end we weighed in at approximately 119 pounds!
We spent our time riveting…
…eating…
…knitting…
….and scoring lots of points with our amazing shooter.
We were glad to have visitors here today. Mentors from our rookie team came to get some parts and discuss the finer points of programming, and how to pass robot inspection. Our friend Chris, from FESTO, came to see how things were doing. He’ll be back again tomorrow to watch the shooter work.
We had families come to spend part of their family day with us, to eat meals with us and watch the robot do its thing, one system at a time. Some parents pitched in to help with the robot building.
For most of the day we had only one system working at a time. It became a bit of a running joke that the entire robot would be fully functional “in the next 10 minutes”. We waited a long time for those 10 minutes to pass. 
When the robot was finally driving, and shooting, and went over the bump, and balanced on the bridge, we celebrated with Girl Guide cookies, courtesy of the Pathfinder group we worked with last week. Thanks so much girls, they were delicious!
We’d like to thank Allan for doing such a great job for us.
This afternoon we were excited to see our new friends, the leaders from the Pathfinder group that we visited yesterday! They came to see our robot and have a look around. We hope to arrange a visit for their pathfinder group in the spring.
We had more visitors this evening when our school hosted Grade 8 information night. Many grade 8 students toured our room and saw our 2009 robot on display in the library. We’re always game to show off our robot to an enthusiastic crowd!
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!
