Only three meetings left, including today, until our first qualifier!
     Benno's been adjusting the robot's arm--putting strings and a length of surgical tubing on it so that our gears don't have to work as hard. He still needs to make the motor-powered spool to wind the strings back up again, but that should be a fairly simple thing to do. JD's been helping to engineer the arm, as well as fixing up the engineering and team notebooks. Jane's been writing a bunch of pseudocode for the autonomous portion of the match and keeping up with Instagram. I might be the gunner this year, which means I need to get plenty of drive practice in.
     As a team, we need to practice our judges' presentation--we've worked out who's going to talk about what, but it's only a rough draft so far at best. Also, everybody needs to write their bios in the team notebook, but we can't do that until JD sets the right pages up and puts our pictures in there.

     Benno was struck with a bolt of inspiration today--he figured out a way to reduce the stress on the worm gear by some 95%, which is amazing  ( :0 ) From what I can tell, it involves cutting a rod using  the Dremel  and hooking up a couple spools of string to motors instead of wearing out our poor worm gear.  JD is helping him out with that, so they're getting that all taken care of. The thread locker didn't work last meeting, so hopefully this will do the trick.
      Also, Benno and JD are trying to come up with a design for our mineral-collecting arm, which  shouldn't be too hard to add to the robot.
     Jane, meanwhile, is figuring out the code for the hanging arm, but until Benno and JD finish what they're doing, we can't test it out.
     37 days left until our FIRST (pun intended) qualifier! I can't wait ( :D )