Build Day 14

Started off the day discussing the Chairman’s Award Submission. We want to get this going as early as possible so we have time to refine it before the submission deadline (02/16/12 at Noon EST). We’re making good progress, the biggest part of the early work on the Chairman’s Team is deciding how we want to present ourselves to the judges.

We upped the speed of the shooter prototype after switching to the CIM-sim. It’s now spinning the 8in wheels at roughly 5500RPM and it shoots to 37 ft with little to no launch angle. The plan is to do more detailed tests tomorrow afternoon.

The collector rollers are coming along we should be able to have all three near completion this weekend.

The drive train brackets and all of those pieces were mostly finished today, so we have everything laid out to assemble the drive train tomorrow.

The controls groups are still working to debug some issues with the low level digital module support in Java. We think if we use a second digital side car it may work, we’re not entirely sure why that is but if it works, it works. Getting SPI to work is becoming much more of a challenge than first thought.

We made good progress today, we need to make more this weekend if we want to stay on schedule.

– Allen Gregory

“We are in the people business. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the banking business, you have customers, you’re in the people business, and it’s how you treat people.” – Nolan Ryan