Status and Progress

Results of Meeting on Saturday, November 7:

• Sheila and the electrical fab team have wired up all of the power distribution and PWM wires for the monster.
• Sam and I have finished wiring three of four encoders and have made a cable for the fourth to solder on next week
• Emily and I have been putting together a list of team members and their proficiency levels in various tasks, including individual machine shop skills, programming skills, and fabrication skills
• James, Mr. Allen, and the programmers continued to teach labview skills by programming for Kermit
  
• Matt taught a group of girls about machine shop skills (he can elaborate better than I can)
  
• A design for the arm has been drafted, featuring a pneumatic lift mechanism.

For next week:

• We need to acquire a cRIO for the monster
• Finish wiring the last encoder.
• Track down the pneumatics modules for the cRIO. Are they on Kermit?
• Put together a pneumatics test board to teach about pneumatics and for prototyping.

Ideas for the future:

• I know Matt's been talking about making an electronics caddy to make swapping the cRIO and other common electronics between robots easier. We need to determine what to put in this module besides the cRIO (The more we put on, the harder it is to remove.)
  
• (If we have the parts) Put together an electrical test board to aid in quick prototyping during the season. I'm envisioning a couple victors, a couple jags, power distro, and all of the cables we need mounted to a board. Then we can just plug in Matt's caddy and be able to test an arm, drive train, or whatever else quickly and easily (and safely).
• We should look into building a robot cart for this season (last year's was barely adequate) I think the bosch rail we have would be ideal for this, and it's also a good exercise in design, CAD, and machine shop skills.