Friday, February 26th, 2003

We met after school at Jamie's house, Brian showed up 20 minutes late and we waited for him because Jamie and Tevis wanted to. Even after Brian showed up, it was very card to get people interested in the Tech Challenge.

Finally, Brian and I got started discussing the design and made a lot of progress. We came up with a way to make the bottom end not have a powered clamp. Basically, the clamp would be a V-shaped piece op metal with a hole in the bottom for the rope to go through. Slipping along the V would be two panels of metal that fall down and lock the rope in place when they are forced down. This would reduce the number of components in the bottom end would be greatly reduced. Brian mentioned that we could slide down the rope instead of climb. We all thought it was a great idea and Brian and I incorporated it into the motorless clamp design. We decided that the bottom clamp would be what we discussed and the top would be variable so that we could control our decent speed. Jamie realized that K'NEX track made the design we tried after the workshop and worked on that. Tevis worked on a rack and pinion system in K'NEX based on orange connectors. He also suggested that we use metal disks for the tops and bottoms of the components and the team liked it. I think we are going to go with metal like Brain wants. Brian fooled around until I was able to initiate a discussion with him. I think Brain and I made a lot of progress but I don't know about Jamie and Tevis. After Tevis left at 4:30, we ended the meeting and stopped doing Tech Challenge stuff officially.