All Said and Done!

What a semester it's been! Now that our slotbot and contest have been completed, we will now take a few moments to reflect on our project.  First of all, I'd like to congratulate ourselves on our quarterfinals finish! Team shoelace was seeded tenth of 28 teams and finished around 7th place.  Our locking mechanism worked wonderfully, successfully blocking all other teams from scoring in the slot.  Our demise came when our conveyer seemingly compressed the balls better than moving them.  With four wheels and a very taught belt, the power needed to deliver enough torque and speed simply wasn't all there.  We scored an average of about 30 grams, but it just wasn't enough to compete with the weighted balls placed on the top of the arena.  Our manufacturing was very accurate, allowing us to make precision parts, and creating our entire machine to fit within the space-restricted slot.  Nearly minutes before the due date, our kevlar string kept breaking when we tried to launch the spring-powered bullet, so we replaced it with Denard Robinson's shoelace, signed by the man himeslf.  Not only did this shoelace do the job we were needing, but added some remarkable style to our bot.  All in all, we are very proud of ourselves and teammates on successfully completing this semester's ME250 slotbot project!