Thursday, July 31, 2008

An exciting month!

Hey everybody. This is Sam again. Sorry we haven't updated you on our summer awesome-ness, so this is what has happened recently:

Saturday, July 19th, Nobel Prize-winning chemist Peter Agre came to our robotics meeting at the Bakken! He knows Earl Bakken, and decided to come and visit the museum. The people in charge at the Bakken had little notice of his visit. He saw us working in the Bakken's workshop, and decided to visit. There also was a photographer for the Bakken's newsletter. He took many pictures of our team and our robot. Mr. Agre, being the cool person that he is, let the robot chase him around the room. That was funny! We were very excited to have Mr. Agre visit us so unexpectedly.

On the 22nd, we had a mini-tournament at Eagan High School. There were only 5 teams including us, so it was a very small event. It was only for fun, and instead of 3 teams on 3, we had 2 on 2. It was fun to see the other teams again, and to hang out. They fed us pizza, which made the day even better.

Now, we are preparing our robot for exposition at the Minnesota State Fair. We have to get the robot there by the 12th of August, so that leaves little time for tweaking and improving the designs and programs. However, I am confident that we will be ready for our grand public debut! We are also working on the Roller, our summer robot from last year. Our CAD person is modeling a standard base design to help us expedite the design process for the the build season.

That's about all that has happened in our robotics team for the last month, other than mundane building, improving and programming. Thanks for reading!