Jeramie met several Columnes Oaks High School students at the Elk Grove Western Festival who used our polycarbonate to help make this awesome robot. Their team is called Wolfpack Robotics.
Then we received a very thoughtful note of appreciation from the Wolfpack’s mentor, Jack Covert, where he described exactly how the team used our products. See below:
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Hi there! This is Jack Covert – I’m the lead mentor and I’d be glad to work with you. We really appreciate the support you guys gave us last year and anyway that we can give back we are thrilled to do so!
We created a robot we named Clawdia. She stands 6’6″ tall and weighs 100 lbs without batteries. The students designed her to compete in this year’s FIRST® competition, Recycle Rush.
The team started by going over the game manual to try and figure out the intricacies of the game and develop a game strategy. The mechanical engineering team then made a number of prototype components using cheap materials like wood, cardboard and PVC. Once we knew what we wanted to build the design team designed the robot using 3D modeling software and produced schematics for our machinists and mechanical teams. Meanwhile the electrical team started writing code to bring the robot to life once the machinists and mechanical teams were finished. Within 5 weeks our robot was built and tested and our drivers had a week of practice before we had to seal the robot up for the competition.
Our competition was at UC Davis and we competed against 65 other teams from as far away as Texas, Hawaii and Alaska. Our game analysis was spot-on and we had a unique design that played the game very well. We seeded well and made it through qualifications and into eliminations. Though we didn’t win the tournament we did very well and our robot performed perfectly.
We are now taking a break while students study for finals and AP tests. In June we are going to start building a prosthetic hand for a local kindergarten boy who was born without fingers on one hand. We will be taking molds, taking measurements and assessing his movement. The hand will be 3D printed from plastic and we will continue to make him new hands as he grows.
We really appreciate the sponsorship from Interstate Plastics. We are completely self-funded and without businesses like you we couldn’t exist. If you would like any more information, let me know. Also, if you guys have any events that you would like us to attend, we could do so and even bring our robot to display.
Jack C.
