Final Pre Contest Post

We have successfully fixed all of the major problems with the car, and now we simply have to re-attach a bracket (we had an alignment issue with the bearings original position). Our arm is continuing to work perfectly, although being able to pick up the heavy balls with our arm would be very nice. We can sometimes get the heavy balls, especially if they are trapped within a bunch of ping pong balls, but this is unlikely. This is why we have the car, which can only pick up two balls due to design limitations, but we did successfully pick up a squash ball with our car, which was a major victory.

Speaking of victories, we happened to have a sort of a "friendly" with another team while testing in the arena. There machine was similar to ours, but mounted on top of the slot instead of in it. Some highlights of this match can be scene in our posted video. Basically we were in a stalemate situation in the center of the arena, but the other team made the mistake of moving their arm up too far. It was simply to move their arm out of the way, so to speak, and get all of the contested balls in the middle to fall to the other side. Needless to say, we won both of our exhibition matches against this team, and hope to use this experience to help us in both the seeding and the actual competition.