This week, quite a few students have come in after final exams to put in some more work on the robot. The shooter has been getting lots of attention with the mechanical team trying to dial in the perfect speed of the motors, angle of the shooter, wheel size, and compression of the ball. Lots of compression seems to be a good idea because it squeezes the ball nice and tight and gives a little more pop on the shot, but we discovered that with too much compression on the ball, the motors bog down and make the shot less accurate and not quite on the ideal trajectory and that a lot less compression than we previously had is what makes for a good clean shot.  With a few people working on the fine tuning of the shooter, another crew has been working on the integration of all the systems. We have the ball intake and the shooters, now we just need to figure out how to get the ball into the shooter after we already have possession of it. The great thing about our shooter now that differs from our previous shooter design is that the ball simply has to barely make contact with the wheels for a good powerful shot, we no longer need something pushing it into the wheels very fast. This makes the job of getting the ball into the shooter easier and some have explored the idea of just pushing it in with our existing floor loader while others are testing the idea of a separate ball indexer mechanism. 

A team of a few students went to UIS, one of our main sponsors that have a large machine shop with many expensive tools we don't have access to at school, to create a preliminary design for the side plates of the robot which will hold up the shooter array. While the basic design was discussed today, it will be finalized and cut next week so we can have what we'll actually be bringing to competition to put on the drive base that we bagged last week. 

All in all, everything is coming together and we are looking forward to our first regional in two weeks!
Jacob Fishman (Sophomore)