Day 8: Crackdown

We finished our hay squeezer design and tested it. It's pretty decent, and there's room for improvement. We received more CAN cable today, and used it to connect the RoboRio with all of the Jaguars, the pneumatics control module, and the radio module on Freyja. The RoboRio seems to work; we then updated the firmware for the Jaguars for it to work. Drive team consideration started today. We also signed up for The Grid: an AI (artificial intelligence) website builder that literally builds itself. We plan to start building it after this season finishes. We continued designing the robot chassis. We also built a VEX robot with omniwheels, and tested them. T-shirts got designed for this year. We also started an initial design of the electrical board.
We had a little incident with the batteries. At around noon, we came across two completely dead batteries that couldn't be charged any more. We set them outside the door of the electrical room. An hour or two later, some of us smelled somehting like rotten eggs in the room while we were bolting Jaguars to Beowulf and working on the Chairbot electrical board during the RoboRio testing. It became increasingly stronger, and we realized that another battery, Maxwell (we name all of our batteries according to scientist names), was swelling up. We aired out the room and within 30 minutes the smell was gone. Back to testing and diagnosing.