Robotics log 3

I have not posted a log since the start of the season; I have been amazingly busy with robotics. The season is now over, I want to quickly out line my next few blogs about for my exhibit. This blog will cover the season and what I learned from it. My next one which will be up soon will cover my written document, which I will talk more about in that blog but it is going to be a How-To guide for running a Robotics Team at FA for Future teams. Then my final blog I will post after or during the competition in Richmond later in March.

Anyways, at my last update we had just got our challenge and were starting to come up with designs. That first week we came up with a way to pick up the game balls and score with them, as well as a very strong drive system. Things were looking good at that point, by the second week is when things started to go downhill a bit. Unfortunately the captain from previous year gave designs for a chassis to the company that sponsors us. This caused some problems as the company had their own private work they had to do before they could start ours. This is understandable, but we could not speed them up and this lead us not to have the basic frame until much later than expected. 2nd 3rd and 4th weeks were not very productive as they should have been, we worked on the other components of the robot so we could quickly assemble them when we got the frame. Yet this was difficult because it was like trying to make parts for an object that you have no idea what it looks like. Also the problem of undedicated members started to arise, we started out with upwards of 25 members. I knew that half of them wouldn’t really be interested, unfortunately that number dropped down to 4. Those three weeks were definitely the most stressful of the whole season. I found out how much lack of sleep and stress can affect school classes.

The programming also proved to be problems which lead to me and Ian spending a few sleepless nights trying to figure out. I am however happy we fought with that then so we didn’t have to later once. Through these hardships we pressed on, luckily we were able to get the frame with one week left to ship. It was a good thing we did a lot of the prep work before hand so we didn’t have to mess around with doing the drawn out tasks when we didn’t have to. It only took us a weekend to finish modifying the frame then getting it up and running. I was really proud how the members that did come to the meetings put their serious gears into drive for that week; we got things done faster than I could have hoped for. After that weekend we started working on a new scoring mechanism. Since we didn’t get the frame on time we were not able to fully design a key component on the original plan. Once we were able to we found out that we could not get it made for another three weeks. Since this was way past the competition deadline, we came up with a much simpler design. All in all I think it was for the best as the previous design was very complicated and probably would require a lot of extra parts and man hours to work. There was also a good chance that the main advantage it had over the current one wouldn’t even prove very viable in a match. So we were able to finish that firing mechanism within the last week, after that we proceeded to test all of our systems and they all seem to be working as good as possible. The robot is now shipped with only a few minor things we need to do before the competition.

As I said earlier I am going to start working on my written document since the robotics season is now come to a close. I will talk about that more in my next blog.