Lobstah Bots Mid-Build-Season-Newsletter
Luke '25 showing off our assembled elevator motor and motor controller which will soon be attached to the robot.
The Lobstah Bots are hard at work, and we have now reached the most important part of build season – building our robot! None of this progress would be possible without your invaluable contributions to the team, and with less than three weeks left until our first competition of 2023, we are calling for your help once more!
This month, the team is having a fundraising drive for new power tools. These new tools will improve the speed, precision, and safety of machining parts in the lab, and they will greatly help us this season and in future seasons.
We made a cumulative list of the parts we will buy with the money we raise:
$1,000: 5 New Power Drills (replacing our pre 2010 drills) $2,000: All of the above plus 1 Rapid Drill Battery Charger 1 Circular Saw 2 Cordless Rivet Guns $3,000: All of the above plus 1 Additional Power Drill 2 Impact Drivers and Batteries 1 Vacuum 1 Jigsaw We are aiming to raise a total of $3,000, and donations of any size are greatly appreciated!
If we exceed our $3,000 goal for this drive and raise $4,000 (or more!), we plan to purchase an additional rapid drill battery charger, a compact drill battery, a right angle drill, a hackzall, an angle grinder, a flashlight, and a compact router.
Zach '25 measuring and marking up a 2 by 1 metal tube before cutting it.
In the meantime, the team has been very busy designing and building the robot! After our initial prototyping, the team continued to make more advanced prototypes of important parts of the robot, including the mechanism to pick up cones. This process helped the team identify ways to improve mechanisms and optimize their designs to be stronger. The team uses CAD (Computer Aided Design) software to design these mechanisms in detail for the mechanical team to build. In the past week, the team finished most of the final CAD designs and the mechanical subteam has almost manufactured all of the parts for the robot. In the coming weeks, the team plans to assemble the robot and tackle any challenges we may encounter with its design along the way!
Sam (Mentor) helping students Kendree '25 and Maxwell '25 set up cameras for testing on our old robot.
The programming team has also been busy working on vision tracking and localization for the robot. This advanced tracking uses two cameras fitted onto the front and back of our testing robot. We have successfully written and tested code that allows the robot to use these cameras to determine its location relative to known visual landmarks on the field.
The outreach and branding team has been busy designing this year’s t-shirts, banner, and buttons! The team takes the many buttons we make with our button making machine to competition and hand them out to other teams.
George '24 preparing to print our latest blue and yellow button designs.
As a reminder, our competition dates this season are as follows:
Week 0: February 18 in Nashua, NH Week 2: March 10-12 in North Scituate, RI Week 4: March 24-26 in Revere, MA
Thank you for all your support! If you want to get involved or have any questions, you can email us at lobstahbots@gmail.com and we would be happy to respond.
Sincerely,
The Lobstah Bots
