It's time to Rack 'n' Roll...

The build season has ended. Buster 399 is shipped. It was a good build season: six weeks of pain staking 14 hour days. The robot this year is competitive, I think we will do well. We have a lift that can reach all three levels, and a ramp that can hold two robots. Did we try to do too much? Maybe. A couple problems I foresee are the banebots transmissions... We know those carrier plates are going to fail, but if they fail at a critical time or not only time will tell. No (scoring) autonomous mode is also big. In the end we took off the camera, so it's probably not going to happen, at least not reliably. We'll try to program a deadreckoning mode, but with translation and rotation of the rack... bleck. At the Hawthorne Heights SCRRF scrimmage though this past weekend it doesn't seem like anyone will have automode, we will see at Los Angeles. At least we can throw together an autonomous that sets us up to load from the human player... I was a little weary about using the suction cup at first but the couple days we have had for practice it seems to work great. Our ramp looks good. Maybe a little small, but it is definitely reliable. So simple too. Only time will tell how we do... It's time to Rack 'n' Roll.

-Brad Voracek
".999~ = 1"