Introduction to the game:
We have split our entire team into 4 mini teams; 3 student teams and 1 mentor team each with a new student or mentor as its leader. For the student teams, skill is equally split up so veteran members are all on different teams. These four teams will compete in a 5190 mini competition after Thanksgiving break. We chose the competition’s elements based off of the hints we thought were shown during the 2018 FRC teaser. The first portion is autonomous. The robot has to go on a teeter totter and balance on it. After that, the robots have to go pick up an 8 x 8-inch plywood cube. One portion will be stacking the boxes into 3 by 3 rows. In another portion, we will be stacking as many boxes as we can in a given amount of time. In the final portion, we will be competing on who has the fastest robot over a certain distance. do to there being an even number of competitions, we have made a tiebreaker portion. the tiebreaker portion will involve elements of balancing and stacking into 3 by 3 rows under a certain amount of time.
All teams have begun planning out strategies on which portions of the competition to focus on and some began making major structural changes that may be necessary for their ideas.
For programming. We setup Xbox controller input for use in driving the robot. We got the X and Y axes of the left stick to move the robot and got a button that we can use for operating the arm. We set up four CAN Talons for use in controlling the wheels to drive the robot. We have not yet done PID( proportional integral derivative controller ). We then proceeded to call the drive method they created in the teleop section of the main robot class so that when teleop becomes enabled they would be able to manipulate the motors using the Xbox controller they configured earlier.
For marketing, we recently finished our NASA grant and started working on the new grant for Shell. We started to find ways to approach to the parents for their contributions through their companies because we researched that a lot of companies that many parents work at have matching programs – whether it is donation matching or volunteer matching – that we can use to build the financial support. I am also planning to do the computer drive this year so we can donate back to Kramden this time.We are also looking for people who are willing to learn website designing from imaginovation. We will most likely continue doing this – grants and planning outreach events.