Howdy! Week two is in the bag! These past 7 days were filled with creating prototypes, building field elements, and designing our pit and other marketing materials!
Cube Intake
Some of our most exciting news this week, we have a working cube intake prototype for our robot! The intake has two arms with wheels on the end, which spin to suck in the cube. The arms keep the cube in place. This is a huge step for the team! Check out this video to see it in action.
Field Element Construction
Yesterday, several members of our team spent all day building the necessary Field Elements for the tasks we are trying to achieve. We built half of a scale with a platform, and half of a switch. It’s not the whole field, but it’s all we need to practice the game elements we are designing our robot for!
The Rise of PacBot
The Marketing team has been designing this year’s pit and t-shirts. We decided to integrate our “Cowboy” theme with the Power Up theme for our pit design! When you first walk in to the pit, you will see a sign that says “Howdy Bots PowerUp Saloon”. We will have two banners on the sides- one Super Mario themed, one PacMan themed. On the back wall, we will have a “PowerUp Menu” which lists things that “Power Us Up” including sponsors, gracious professionalism, and brownies! Below is a sneak-peek to what we have planned!
What’s next for the team? Now that we have our field elements built, we can start prototyping even more. We hope to have a fully functional robot built very soon! Follow our social media accounts for more updates.
Bonus Fun-Fact: Mario was not originally named Mario. In the game Donkey Kong, he was simply called “Jumpman”.