Hello friends and fans,

This Thursday at around 3 pm, our team will be presenting to our Senior Design class at Virginia Tech. This will be our first live stream. This stream is going to be a private stream for our blogger followers to see how the team is progressing, and for us to check the abilities of Youtube's multi-cast streaming. Please bare with us as this is our first attempt at live streaming an event.

Eventually, we will be checking Youtube's ability to live stream processed videos involving multiple video panels, but for now we are just going to have one live stream. Make sure to tune in tomorrow to view our midterm presentation.

To those of you who haven't heard from our facebook page (which you should go like if you haven't done so already) is that,

WE MADE IT INTO THE COMPETITION!!!!!!

Now the team has to really buckle down and get ready for the spring semester build season. We will be meeting up on Google+ hangouts every Sunday over winter break to make sure parts are ordered, concepts are finalized, and the schedule for the spring is as fluid as possible.
For those of you who have been following our posts, our final presentation went extremely well. Some photos were taken and will be posted over the next few days.

Again, thank you all for your help in liking the facebook page. We hope we can inspire you over the next few months to either enter the RASC-AL competition in future years or even get into robotics as a hobby yourself.

Preparing for our "Final"

Just a quick update: Our team is preparing for our Senior Design final presentation of the semester. This presentation will be a 45 minute presentation overview of what we have been working on all semester. Along with this presentation, our team has a 50 page paper due Sunday covering the system design process of the rover. Home stretch before Winter Break!!!
Only 8 more days until we find out if we made the competition!!!! Let's keep this momentum up and keep it going into the build season.

Keeping the Team Rolling!

After much discussion about wheel designs, what we thought was important in a wheel, and many arguments between wheel designs, our team has finally made progress on the wheels being used on our rover. After taking many designs into consideration, our team has picked the top 3 wheel designs to investigate further. From the initial Analytic Hierarchy Processes, we were able to determine the best designs for our rover. Further analysis will go into optimization of the design and a cost benefit analysis for the wheel designs, however we feel confident that one of the top three designs will be used on the rover.

With only a little bit less than a month until our Design Proposal is due, the team has some major decisions to make within the next few weeks. We do feel confident in our process and the results we have been achieving thus far. This weekend we will have a few mini-projects to create a few rock collection designs and prototypes cut between Sunday and Wednesday. Servos have been purchased and some basic servo coding has been written to take our models and begin to put them into motion! Check in this week to see what kind of prototypes we have come up with.