With only 1 week to go in the build season, there is still a lot to do to make the robot competition ready. The Sussex Mini-Regional on the 16th will be our first opportunity to see what our robot is capable of accomplishing. Unlike prior years there will not be a “Bag Day” which halted any additional changes so we will be able to use our experiences at Sussex to make sure we are ready for the Midwest Regional in Chicago the first weekend of March.
The team will be hosting two events next week, the week of February 16th. Our Annual Open House will be on Monday, February 17th from 6pm-8pm. Multiple levels of FIRST groups and several of our sponsors are invited to exhibit their teams and companies at this event. Following Open House, we are hosting a SWENext (Society of Women Engineers) event from 10am-12pm on Saturday, February 22nd. Kids from grades 4th-8th will be able to participate in fun STEM activities that explore different areas of science and learn about FIRST.
The shooter prototype makes a perfect shot into the inner power port during testing.
CAD
CAD hustled this week to create models of the final robot and mechanisms. Focus has been primarily on the Tower, which is the part that cycles the Power Cells from the Hopper to the Shooter. Moving Power Cells through the robot efficiently and accurately will be vital to our success.
Strategy
With the Tableau Database finished, strategy is able to collect data from different competitions. The team playbook was completed over the past weekend with different unique names for each strategy. They have also completed the Cycle Ball flow tool which has allowed them to begin running simulations. The Strategy team also opted to develop their own in-house scouting app to collect more accurate and relevant information during competition.
Business
We submitted our Woodie Flowers and Chairman’s Award submissions last week. With Chairman’s submitted, our Chairman's tryouts have begun. The tryouts will help determine who will be doing the presentations in front of the judges during competitions. Business has been finalizing our Open House and SWE events. We look forward to seeing you at these events on February 17th and 22nd! We will also be taking pre-orders for fan t-shirts at the Open House so be sure to get your order in!
Electrical
The electrical team has been working in conjunction with the CAD and fabrication teams to assemble and wire mechanisms like the drivetrain. They also helped set up a new REV encoder for the turret which they gave to programming to code for. Team members have also been helping the assembly process for the robot along with anything else that other teams need help with.
The competition hopper demonstrating how quickly it can offload it’s payload.
Fabrication
Fabrication continues to build robot components as the game elements are now completed. From CAD drawings, the metal shop has finished the final piece for the competition drive train, the gearbox. With another set of designs coming in, they finished building the competition hopper.
Programming
As the build season is drawing to a close, our programmers continue to optimize the code. They designed a layout for the Shuffleboard which is a dashboard that is located on the driver station. They continued the fine tuning of Limelight along with smoothing out the turret which now tracks the target with very little variance or lag. With more shooter testing being done, they have been doing more calculations to increase the probability of making the shot into the power port. More testing of the autonomous code has also been conducted.