So, today was a very full day! FIRST Team 3637 visited, and toured, two of our Mentors’ businesses. First, we went to Paul Bamburak’s company, Alpha Automation. This company specializes in circuits, control systems and automation. We saw many cool things, like the PCB Board Machine, (video below) which made PCB boards without the need of a person soldering on each individual component. For example, there is a product that is used to determine if a child will get a head injury from falling from a certain height, on a playground surface. We also got to see prototypes in the next room, being made to control stage props in a theater, using Mecanum wheels.

Next we went to Haskel Zeloof’s company, Diversatech, to see the shop, a prototype design for our scissor lift and demonstrations of the Waterjet and CNC Turret punch (videos below). We also got to see one of our brackets being Waterjetted. After the tour, we discussed our scissor lift with an engineer known as “Mud Dude.”

Later, we went to lunch at a Chinese restaurant, discussing the issues and planning for the work that we were going to do in the workshop later. We arrived to find that nothing was working on the robot. We later diagnosed that the entire digital sidecar was dead. After swapping out the digital side car for the spare, we jumped the PWM Servo pins, and successfully were able to control our servos.

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