Kickstarter

Hello everyone,

Our build season ends next Tuesday...just a few more days left.  In typical FIRST fashion, the remaining days will be VERY long work days and VERY late nights.  We are having an open-house for friends, family and sponsors this Saturday at our shop, starting at 1pm.  If you're in the area, stop by and say hello.

We've been continuing our tweaks and improvements to both the competition robot and our practice robot. In the video below you'll see the our bridge climbing and balancing capabilities as well as some more shooting!

Our robot has 4 drive motors, 1 motor for the shooter, 1 motor for the turrett, 1 motor for the bridge tool and 3 motors for the ball pickup/feed system.  For those of you keeping score at home, thats 10 motors, each with individual motor controllers, wiring, breakers, software control and gearboxes.  Gatorzillas also has a web camera to allow it to see the shooting targets.  Image processing software routines are used to find the targets, turn the turrett toward them and determine the distance to the goal, which determines the speed at which the shooter motor must spin in order to shoot the ball into the goal....not too far, not too short....just right.....nothing but net!  We also have proximity sensors to allow the robot to accurately feed the game balls through the robot and queue them up just below the shooter.

Every one of these systems presented major engineering and design challenges and then, of course, integrating all of the systems into a fully-functional robot is not easy either.

We have only 7 days left for this Kickstarter Project. We've had tons of support from a lot of generous backers.  Hopefully we can get fully funded in the next 7 days.  As you can see in the below picture, the momentum is gaining.  With the help of just a few more backers, I think we can make it over the hump in the next 7 days!

The Gatorzilla students are definitely getting excited! Build season is nearly over...and the competitions are just around the corner! 

Thanks for all of your support and please continue to spread the word about our project on all of your social media sites.

Thanks
Gatorzillas, FRC #2936