Excited to have the opportunity to participate in STEM in the School Yard event again this year. This United Way event is “designed to inspire students imaginations and spark and early interest in STEM careers.” Sounds familiar right? While we didn’t get to take any picture with Troy Aikman, but we did throw a few […]

This Thursday, Texas Instruments invited all of the “house teams” in the area that are mentored by TI employees to come visit their Richardson wafer fabrication site, which manufactures billions of dollars of electronics chips every year. It was awesome to see both how electronics are made (which make up most robots), as well as

Texas Instruments – Outreach and RFAB VisitRead More »

The RoboChargers were excited to be invited for the 4th year in a row to demonstrate our robot on the Texas Instruments main campus for the “Take Your Daughters and Sons to Work Day” event. Each year, this event attracts thousands of TI parents and kids, which gives us a chance to explain why they

Outreach – Texas Instruments – Take Your Daughters and Sons to Work DayRead More »

Conrad Collegiate Academy Signing Day Last year was the inaugural year for the Conrad Collegiate Academy, which partners with Richland Community College to graduate students from high school with an associates degree. The program is quite competitive, and is drawing new students from across the district to Conrad, many of whom are interested in technology and

Outreach – Conrad Collegiate AcademyRead More »

More Prototyping After roughly a week of prototyping, we unfortunately had questions coming in at the rate of answers. Can we build an effective shooter, despite relatively little team experience, by using online resources to get close and then dial it in? Will a roller or belted intake function properly this year with our preferred

Build Season – Day 11/12/13 – More PrototypingRead More »

Detailed Prototyping Saturday was a pretty critical day. We basically had 6 hours total of meeting time during the entire school week, and tacked on another 9 hours on Saturday. While the Tuesday through Thursday prototyping was predominately build via rough hand tools, we began to upgrade prototypes to CAD driven detailed prototypes to get

Build Season – Day 8 – Detailed PrototypesRead More »

Stu-Bots I arrived home late Wednesday night to my concerned wife wondering “what the heck I ordered”… which can only mean… game pieces are here! With game pieces, we could now play “stu-bots” or “student robots”. This exercise is always valuable for being able to visualize how the game will flow. It also gives us a

Build Season – Day 6 – Prototyping and Stu-BotsRead More »