THE FINAL COUNTDOWN

Today is the last day for us to build our robot for the FIRST Robotics regional competition in Victoria.

We designed a catapult and a cube collection device.

For our cube collector, we rigged two motors with talons to spin at an RPM that can grab the cubes. The catapult uses aluminium rods and fibreglass to lift our cube into the switch.

"We looked at the designs of more experienced teams to get ideas, and then modified some ideas to fit our chassis," says Triva Sully, our pit manager.

The theme of the FIRST Robotics competition this year is Power Up. So basically, we have to feed cubes to our robot, or the robot can pick up a cube, and bring them to the switch or the scale to obtain a certain number of points. Other robots will also climb a platform (PRO TIP: we don't have a climbing mechanism because it is more strategic for "rookie" teams to focus on one task).

"We're vying for first place and we're pretty confident that we can beat out other teams," says Jimothy Trees, the leader and mentor of our team. Is he being sarcastic or not? We can't tell, he's a robot.

"We have a solid team," says Lima Dogie, our senior engineering captain. "I think we have a good chance to do better than we did last year." Last year, we placed within the top 25 teams of British Columbia.

This year we are hoping for FIRST. haha :)

Robo Todd out.

<3