Hard work pays off!

Hello Everyone~

Well, we have had to make some changes to the robot. Arrow, one of our mentors, always says 'Break it early, break it often.' What he means is that for us to see where our robot is weak, break it early enough so that we still have time to re-design it, and test it again to see whether or not it will work like it should!!

So....with that in mind, our first re-design is with our ball chute. Remember the blue duct-taped chute? Well, you can forget about it. It was flexing too much and didn't allow us to shoot our basketball accurately all the time.
Here's the new prototype:

You can see that the chute is more rigid, so hopefully it will allow us to shoot more accurately to gain more points during the competitions.

Here's some other pics of our team working diligently:

Olivia soldering to her heart's content, wiring up the main controller of the robot:

Here's our battery compartment. Our robot runs completely on batteries, so batteries are important!! Notice how we'll use this for both battery storage and battery charging:

Our biggest challenge so far has been getting the ball off the ground and up into the shooter! We started off with a 'scoop' idea, but that didn't fly. Our team finally decided on a conveyor system that will literally deliver the ball up to the shooting system:

You can see the brown track of the conveyor off to the right side of this picture:

Here's proof that someone other than Mason actually works on this robot:

Wow....all our hard work finally comes together. This thing might actually work:

Still have more work to do! Stay tuned!
Thanks for all your support, everyone!

~Mason and Cassidy