10/24 Meeting Report

We made a lot of great progress last night.

On the programming front, Holden, Sean and Bradley were able to get  
the programming to to allow for teleop control (using the game  
controllers) to get both the engines and servo's to respond to driver  
commands.  We should be able to test drive the robot in a week or so  
at this rate

Scott, Andrew and Logan worked on the Robot's structure and using a  
design idea from Sean, redesigned the spinners that we plan to use to  
extract the batons from the dispensers.  A few manual field tests show  
some improvement in timing for the rotation and it looks like this  
idea will work.  The new design uses the long axels and some "L"  
brackets and appears to be much simpler than our previous concept.  As  
we've learned before, in robot design simple is almost always better!

Andrew and Logan continued to prototype ideas for a magazine to hold  
the captured batons and a rotating arm to move them to be able to score.

Lastly, Scott and Andrew were forced to re-design the drive train  
given where the batons will be stored and we will likely be moving  
from four engines driving the robot (one in each corner) to two  
centrally located engines driving each side (one per side).  We'll  
need to test how this works on the field and obstacles in the next  
week or so.

The next meeting will be Thursday (10/28) from 6:00 - 8:00pm.  We'll  
have pizza waiting for the boys, please let me know of any dietary  
preferences / restrictions.

Given next Sunday is Halloween, there will be NO PRACTICE on Sunday  
night