This week is our last week of school before exams! We're making small adjustments to our robot for the ball challenge, and we should be ready by tomorrow! As the year is coming to a close, we look back to the beginning and see our original squarebot, and we realize how far we've come, and how much we've learned this semester!

This is a picture of our robot with some minor fixes for the challenge!

To finish out this week, we have  made adjustments to our robot for better performance on our ball challenge. Next Tuesday we will try to complete the challenge in class. This is officially our last post of the year, and we hope you've enjoyed following this blog about robotics. We've really enjoyed learning lots about how things work and how to use teamwork to our advantage. We really didnt know what to expect when we fist started robotics, and its crazy to see how far we've come and how much we've learned.

Here's a final picture of our robot!

Today we are installing our arm onto our robot, to be able to pick up the balls. Our next step will be to program the robot to move the arm, and close the end of the arm around the arm. We should be able to finish our challenge by the end of this week.

This is our arm attached to our robot!

This week we updated our arm, and we are waiting on another motor to be fixed. We need a 4th motor to move the end of our arm to pick up the ball. Next week we want to complete the challenge by Wednesday. We also need to connect our arm to the robot.

This is a picture of our new arm design!

This week our goal is to finish the ball challenge. Today we found that our structure for our arm is not working out as well as we wanted. We plan on changing out design this week. We think we have learned from our mistake, but that will help us in the long run. For our challenge, we got a blue ball from Mr. Martin and we must use it to score points.

Here is a picture of that ball

Ending the week off in a new direction we have been able to complete the structure for our robot to complete its new challenge now our next focus is to begin coding and programming

Our goal for next week is to sufficiently connect our new part of  our robot to the rest of the body so we can have full control of the hand and body

Here is a photo of our team working on setting up our program

Today, we worked on our arm for the new ball challenge, and we plan to put it on this week. We'll only be in class on Thursday and Friday due to testing going on in our school. It was difficult to find the design that would work right, but we feel that our design will work well. We also made a new structure from our robot to support the arm.

Here's a picture of the change to our robot!