Update on stuff

Some of you know that I have been at Hydrogel working on the 15 lb bot every tuesday, thursday and saturday for the last 2/3 weeks. It's exhausting but we're making progress. I owe a big thank you to Ben and Alan for coming and helping out.

We are nearing the end, but as always, new challenges have come up. Over 400 holes later, the baseplate is now essentially done. It weighs 1.6 lbs. Both drive wheels are done, the spring-loaded bearings that run along the inside of the shell are done, We made custom 1/8" washers to raise the drive motors up off the baseplate, and that whole assembly is done. All the weapon assemnbly stuff is done. The teeth are done, but may need modification. The only thing left to do is the wiring.... or so we thought.

We took all the parts to the scale and weighed everything. With eight motors and 12 battery cells, we have a bot that weighs 17.2 lbs. We definitely need to do some modification of parts, and there's a chance we may have to run with 6 motors and 10 battery cells... run everything at 12V... I don't know yet, I need to do some more testing of all the electronics.

Eddie came down to watch the antweight competition at Robot MarketPlace, and to see what we've been up to. The antweight competition was kinda fun...