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Spreading the Word

Today several of us, Paul Vitale, Joshua Philpott, and myself, went with our esteemed mentor Mr. Urquhart to meet with a local engineering society. We presented our robot, the FIRST competition and ethic, and our tentative plans and goals. They were very receptive, and offered to potentially contribute monetarily or in the form of mentorships for next year's competition! It was incredibly exciting, and very good for our regional reputation.
I got an opportunity to speak with several of them, and, personally, its very exciting to see the potentials of an Engineering Degree. As a future Computer Scientist, they gave me advice on college and seeking our corporate opportunities early and, of course, focusing on my academics. But all in all it was an excellent meeting and I think it did our program very well.


Just about time... and no functioning arm!

We've been working on this alternative arm mechanism, mostly in the conceptual realm. And although no, it's not working yet, I think that this will be the best vertical motion design that we could have derived. We're lifting the arm vertically via internally telescoped cable, and then externally pulling the entire robot up through a triangularly mounted winching cable.... It actually sounds an awful lot like one of our first designs! :P
I think that this is quite excellent, actually. We've already got scaled prototypes of this new design and, without going into the hugely technical details, we should be able to achieve our entire desired motion, practicably, in under 10 seconds. Now I'm not sure how that will actually turn out, but design should be great. That is, if we can get the parts! We're so low on time that we can't get them professionally machined... hopefully a regional aluminum shop will be available. Fingers crossed!!


Arm Disaster

So we found out from Dr. Reinholtz that the CIM Motor intended for use with the arm won't have enough power to lift us in the 20 second window that we have. So we're scrapping the whole system! Yay, starting from the drawing board... Our new design will just lift up a hook and then winch our robot up. This will give us more direct power so we can lift the robot more rapidly. Here's to hoping that this one won't be scrapped too!! Yay for optimism.

Michael Tingley


I have been involved in robotics since my freshman year. In my time in Robotics I've been programming, engineering, CAD, and Physics. I have also had extensive mentoring of Creekside Middle School's FLL team. I would say that the robotics program has probably had the most significant influence on some of my future goals, and, as a prospective Computer Scientist, it has shown me in a very real way one of the possibilities of my future.