Building

During the preparation period the building crew built a VEX robot (VEX is a mini robot which is built to be participated in the FTC competition of FIRST). We built the VEX in order to participate in the VEX competition of Microsoft.
The first step taken by the building crew was to think up a design for a robot that could compete in the microsoft VEX challenge.
It was hard for the building team to decide between the two designs they thought of, and after consulting with our mentors we came to a conclusion that the best design was building a gripper that catches a game piece and can rotate in 250 degrees, a thing saving a lot of time in the mission of Microsoft. We sent this robot to the competition of Microsoft.
We also sent the VEX to "Mesudarim" series which can be seen on the television in order to publish FIRST among the people in Israel.
After that, because our weakness in building, the building crew practiced using the new tools and machienes and made some small models.
After practising with building, the crew started training on planning robots based on previous years' games, like the game "Rack N' Roll" of 2007, where the building crew had a problem with catching the Tetras (a triangle that the robot should catch and pick up) - taking the Tetras was a really easy thing to do but holding it with the "hand" of the robot was pretty hard.
Another problem was the hight of the Goals (the base that the Tetras should sit on) - the goals' hight wasn't equal.
Thinking up for ideas took us a long time, but at last we decided to build the chassis with wheels that works like wheels of a tank, a lifting system which is forklift and on it's edge there is a 95 cm pole that becomes longer by piston that pushes the aluminum profile and at the top there is a 38 cm pole on a vertical axe to the other pole, that opens into the Tetra and lifts it up. The longest aluminum pole stays close to the robot and by that, holds the Tetra in the air. Based on that idea, we built a small plastic model of the robot.

Likewise, the building crew also practised the game of 2003, "Stack Attack", where they decided to build chassis with six wheels a chain on them.
On the robot there is a box with the sizes of the box that the robot should pick up. The box enters a hole and locks there by a 1.5 cm crate that being activated by attraction. When there is one box in the crate it goes up until the end of the crate and then the crate opens and there is a big heap of boxes.

After the building crew prepared as much as they could for the kickoff, FIRST has published the clues for 2009 game.
The crew interpreted the clues and thought that the game this year would include a football ball (one of the clues was the fish "Moonfish" which is similar to football, and the second clue was like an address that if we follow it we would arrive to a place near a football field). That's why the building crew decided to prepare themselves to a football game and thought about the idea of building a hole in the chassis with the shape of trapeze so the robot can catch the game pieces easily, and when the game pieces are being held by the robot a conveyor belt pushes it up, and then the robot throws it (there is one horizontal wheel and one vertical wheel to throws the game pieces with more spin and power) planning the robot according to the football was pretty problematic because of the strange shape of the game pieces, that rolls in unstandard and unpermanent.