It’s hard to believe 2017 is quickly coming to a close and the holidays are upon us! During this time of year, it is often customary to look back at what has been accomplished in the past months. So, we’re going to do that in this post. In late summer, we shared with you a garden bot that I built. If you’ll remember, I had joined the Pitsco team in April and wanted to try my hand at creating a unique TETRIX^® robot to help increase my familiarity with the product and to test my skills. It was a fun experience resulting in a pretty awesome garden bot!

In that same vein, my colleagues and I have been collaborating to build a robot every quarter using TETRIX parts, other Pitsco products, an assortment of other items, and even some 3-D-printed parts. Our creative juices have been flowing, and we’ve come up with some fun and innovative ideas.

But enough talk – let’s get a look at them! Here’s a brief glimpse into our builds this year. 

Real-World Ready 

For the first quarter, we designed a backhoe/digger of sorts. The build has a shovel mechanism on the end that can scoop up whatever item you’d like. You can see we filled our bucket with corn to show that the backhoe can pick up very specific items. We found a lot of really cool real-world connections while assembling this robot. Can you think of any?

Every Kid’s Favorite

Our second-quarter robot is probably one of my favorites! I remember when I was little asking my parents for money so that I could try to win a prize, against all odds, on the ever-popular claw machine. My parents would tell me “no” virtually every time, but that didn’t make me love the concept, the chance, or the game any less.

Our amazing team brought this game back to life using TETRIX parts, including our TETRIX MAX Rack and Pinion Linear Slide Pack. We even 3-D printed the claw for the game. This one was created a little before the 4th of July, so of course we had to go with a red, white, and blue claw! 

This game was a hit with the Pitsco employees!

Powered Up

Our third-quarter robot was a lot of fun as well. We came out with a brand-new motor, the TorqueNADO™. And this super powerful motor includes an encoder feature. It’ll certainly be a game changer in the classroom and in competitions. That being said, we wanted to create a robot that would showcase the power of the TorqueNADO. So, we created our very own TETRIX RoboCart using just two TorqueNADO motors. Only two! As you can see from the videos, the motors have amazing power and durability.

Stay Tuned . . .

As for the fourth quarter, we’re building as we speak. BUT, I can’t disclose what we have up our sleeve quite yet, so stay tuned on social media! You’ll see it soon.

I hope you enjoyed our creations as much as we did. TETRIX has so much versatility with what you can do. Sometimes it’s best for the build objective to be just to have fun! Feel free to share with us what builds you’ve been creating in the comments below!