The point of no return 2011-05-28
This week we heard that we will be getting some sponsorship from ARM – for which, many many thanks! – and what with that and the money that we have in so far, we are now approaching half way towards our fund raising target. So it’s time to take a leap of faith and book things (like flights) before the prices rise any further, and keep our fingers crossed that some more money will come in. As of this evening the flights are booked (with complicated travel arrangements given that 2 of us will be travelling out to Turkey from Stansted on 5th July and one of us is visiting CERN in Geneva on that day) and the team is now registered to take part.
There was a lovely article about the team here last Friday.
And we now have wheels! MicroKerf did a great job in laser cutting the wheel blanks for us: and they caused some mystification when they turned up at my workplace on Wednesday.
And now that Mackays have ground our split rings to size and we have enough cable ties, the job of assembling the wheels has begun.
The assembly process involves blu-tack, lots of cursing, and a fair bit of dexterity, but once complete you get the finished (hopefully not too carpet-mincing) article:
This week we’ll pop them on the old (Lego) robots and see how they work.
We also have a task list, at long last – after various threats and displays of fierceness, I managed to get Andrew and Eric to commit to paper the things that still needed to be done for the team to get out to Istanbul with 2 working robots. We have 37 days to make it all happen.
There’s some wire in the post at the moment; once that’s here we can press on with a few vital stages. The chassis is the next crucial stage; once we have the design for that sorted, we can progress further. It’s half term week so I’ll be cracking the whip. We need to keep the momentum going.