so my GOATED teammate whose shall not be named figured out the TPU problem: the printer just wasnt strong enough to feed it in! i honestly have some doubt that that was THE problem, considering how easy the solution is (just unspool a bunch of filament onto the ground), but whatever we ball‼️
anyways the first third of today was spent working on that servo mount and arms CAD file i mentioned before as my partners finished up cutting the shafts and legs for the new tensioners. i also got the tensioners printed, but that was pretty quick since its just a few ~1x0.5” pieces
the second third was spent doing the assembly for all the pieces, since we had to take apart each leg completely, and then go down the assembly line to put it together. i was responsible for putting on the tensioners and then the motors with these really handy alligator clips Carlos graciously gave us that allowed me to get short screws into holes that were far into the leg.
then, once the motor is attached, my partner would attach the wheel and get the belt on there. i think he used some like dark magic cause the belt was really hard to get on before it was tensioned, idek how he did it now…
my other partner would then put on the insert, bearings, and shaft for attaching the leg to the chassis. once we were done, we all spent some time getting the legs on the chassis but we didnt finish. i rushed to start the flywheel TPU print we designed a while ago before we left and spent the rest of the day on…

THE SPACE X TOUR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

we got to go to spacex and have a little tour with one of patricks friends!!!!!!!!!! it was really really really cool, the facility was huge and we such a bunch of fuel tanks, satellites, an engine actively being built, and a phased antenna array. that last thing nerdsniped me so hard, and because Simon (one of our “tour guides”) was an engineer that worked on the Starlink user terminals (which also had the same type of antenna array as the Starlink satellites) i was able to ask a bunch of questions about it. apparently, they both have a bunch of antenna put together and arranged such that, by controlling the phase of the signal coming through each of the ~50 antennae, can focus on a narrow beam of EMF waves and effectively filter out signal to only a specific Starlink satellite in the sky. super cool!!!!

no photo(s) cause we weren’t allowed to take any but its chill