Category: 2017 Engineering

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11/15/17 – Final Pre-Thanksgiving Meeting

Mavericks

The Mavericks started to mount their new clamping system, mounted pistons to their lifting mechanism, and worked on pneumatics. A few of their members also worked on Clockwork’s shooter with some of their spare time.

Mentor

The mentors attached their sled to their arm.

Panthers

The Panthers repaired their elevator, worked with some broken chain, worked on pneumatics, and began mounting different elements of their mechanism to their robot.

3rd Pick

3rd Pick came up with another new idea for their mechanism design due to a lack of time. They began a snow plow design which was worked on by the majority of the team. Their programmers read over Java tutorials.

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11/04/17 – Mini Comp Updates

Mavericks

The Mavericks built their battery box,  finished their linear elevator which required them to work through some problems with the bearing hitting aluminum, and worked on a wooden intake mechanism. After that, they tested their mechanism and worked on the programming that would move their robot forward. They then had one of their veteran members help other teams with electrical setup. Their plan for Wednesday is to work on load-bearing issues and drivetrain issues.  

Panthers

The Panthers worked on their drivetrain, gearboxes, and wheels. They began work on assembling their elevator and wiring their compressor. Once handing their robot over to their programmers, they had a program made to drive their robot straight using a gyro and were able to begin testing it.

3rd Pick

3rd Pick began by drawing up designs for their mechanism and then starting building parts of it. They also worked on their drivetrain, electrical, and pneumatic system. Their programmers coded their subsystem and learned how to use a PIDSubsystem in Java.

Mentors

The mentors began planning out their claw mechanism.

Marketing

The marketing team worked on the Shell grant, learn how to work the button maker, got plans for new designs, encouraged members to read emails, and explained the computer drive to the team.

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10/28/17 – THOR at Millbrook

THOR AT MILLBROOK
On October 28, we attended THOR Thundering Herd of Robots) – a North Carolina offseason event. In this event, we competed against teams from all around the state along with a few rookie teams and teams from out of state. We went through qualifying with a 4-2 record, placing us as the eighth seed going into alliance selections. We were then the first pick of the second alliance putting us in an alliance with 1533 and 3459. We won our quarterfinals with flying colors against the seventh alliance. Unfortunately, our run came to an end sooner than expected with two losses and a win in the semifinal round. It was a great run!

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10/07/17 – Intro to Mini-Competition

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.