This week we hope to finish building our robot for the racquetball challenge.  We need to completely replace our arm with a new one with a stronger "elbow" joint and a new "hand" that can pick up and drop the racquetball.

This week we have been relocated into a portable.  Since we couldn't make much progress on the "hot bot", we have basically no updates to update.  We can however tell you that we did a current event while in the portables.

We have all agreed upon a modified scoop design for our challenge.  In order to support such a heavy endofactor, we are going to increase the power our arm joint has by changing the gears around.  We believe that the sacrifice in speed will be worth it with our endofactor design.  Also, this week we are being relocated into a portable for the super testing.

So far this week we have mainly been coming up with ideas for our latest challenge.  There are many ways to go about placing the rubber ball into the pvc pipe but we are leaning towards a scoop design.  Any attempts at getting help from other students who took our class last year have been futile as they had a slightly different challenge.

We have learned that our next challenge involves a big pvc pipe and a rubber bouncy ball.  Our challenge is to place the ball into the pvc pipe and different pipes are woth different points.  Also, we are timed.

We finally went for an official run and ended up getting 100 by missing the chance to get 120 by a second! But we were the first group in the period to finish and are now ready for our next challenge!

We finally got the code in and hotbot is seen picking up its first tetrahedron for the win!!!!
The only dilemma we have encountered is a problem with torque and we might have to switch out one of our gears on our design.