Hey everybody! Hope that you have had a good break so far. The robotics team has been working very hard for the last 3 weeks since stop build day to get the robot running and presentable.
  This week we had our very first visit to the machine shop in 2014! Very exciting for everyone. On Tuesday (March 4) Kayli and Harris went down to provo to the machine shop at 6 o'clock in the morning to work on the design for the shooter. The next day 8 people went to the shop and got the full tour of UIS's establishment and how they make the things they do. We learned amazing things about our sponsors and the shop that we have been working in for several years. We also got to hear a safety precaution from one the workers at the machine shop. Everyone is thankful for everyone of their fingers.
  This week has been a busy one what with the Utah competition inching closer and closer every day. Its but a lot of pressure on the team to get the robot ready and perfect for competition. The team has been up to the challenge though! We keep forging on.
  Update on the robot: The machine shop was ready and eager to help with the shooter and the structure should be on the robot and running by Sunday night. The intake is steadily chugging along and should be read about the same time as the shooter. Very exciting to those members of the team that remember taking off each bumper and replacing it with the right color one, this year we will have Velcro covers to our bumpers meaning that instead of taking off the entire bumper we just pull the velcro down to reveal the other color!
  Today three people went down to the machine shop to work on the shooter and other things, they are promising us that the engravings on the shooter will be fantastic. We also had another work session at school from 12 to 8 during which we started working on the flipper that will deliver the ball to the shooter and the mechanized intake both of which will have some pneumatics part to it. The Rookie bot had the upper part taken off because we need the base sense its very close the the actually system that we will us in the competition (shape wise). We made goal after goal in an attempt to understand the shooter better and shoot over the truss many times. The day ended with a productive feeling and full stomachs thanks to the Fishman's.
   The next week with be a very stressful one for the team but we will pull through and win Utah to go on to St Louis. Hope everyone will go to the Utah competition and cheer 3245 on!
 -Sage Moreland:D

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) 

Today we were working on many different things, we had a group of people on floor-pickup, Kayli and Reid improved several encountered problems with our shooter, we were also working on bumpers, and the chairman's video. Kayli and Reid had a rough time figuring out what exactly they could do about the shooter problems. The bumpers were done quickly. For lunch we had some pizza, it's actually been a long time since we had pizza, so I think by what I'm about to say includes everyone, I absolutely enjoyed the pizza! After lunch we showed two lower school girl through our program, and let them drive with George (our driver). The main attraction of the day, however, were the interviews for our chairman's award video. We interviewed almost every team member, it's really cool watching different people answering the same questions in such a similar way, because they all know what our team is about. Even though at first people seemed shy toward the camera they realized there is nothing to be shy about. At the end we brought this year's practice robot over to the practice field and were able to floor load the game piece into our system, now the only thing we should have to work on is the shooter.

Good Interviews today!
Christoph Uhl