Design & Build by David C.
Tuesday – Today was a very exciting day for the team, as the robot started to come together for the first time. The team tested a finalized version of the shooter prototype (yes, still a prototype, sadly) and were very pleased with the results. The claw mechanism also is approaching completion; it was hooked up to the main robot and was successful in performing its function. The team is also planning to test an auto-balancing code that utilizes the gyro on the robot. The robot is close to done, but there’s still a lot of work to be done and parts (and awesomeness) to be added.
Thursday – The team continued to work on the different aspects of the robot. The claw mechanism was tested as part of the robot. A few tweaks are still necessary. Our Progress is only hindered by small problems at this point, but, as the coaches tell us, we’ve been in worse situations before. More testing of the drive system and shooter has proven to be very satisfactory.
Friday- The build team encountered a severe problem in relation to our robot’s design and the behavior of the game pieces. With our current design, the foam basketballs would contact each other and essentially stick together. This would cause the one ball to roll over the other and jam the entire system. We were extremely frustrated with this discovery, but had we not found this out, it would have been disastrous on the field. Core members stayed late in order to discuss a new design strategy as well as our plan for the remainder of build season. With the limited time remaining, we believe we have found a way to avoid such issues and still come out on top with the limited time remaining to us.
Saturday – Today, we built a new robot.
CAD by Pranav K.
This week, the CAD team was faced with the preparing the Robot Binder, where we included various pictures and text to describe our robot’s design and its various parts and subsystems. By this point, CAD had already designated pages for each subsystem that the whole team had predicted from the initial design stages; mainly drive, electrical, pneumatics, shooter, claw, and frame were used withe the assistance of the program in Adobe InDesign (similar to to Microsoft Publisher). We began to render various shots of the subsystems of the CAD models and incorporate some physical pictures of our robot and its parts. With some difficulties in discerning exactly how and where to place each image (once rendered), the CAD team is now on its way to completing the binder and having a fully organized system for our robot design. The team hopes to win the Robot Design Award, for which the binder is a required element.
In addition, the CAD Team is now completing the connections between the electrical board wires to motors outside of the metallic belly-pan. The general wiring of specific parts on the belly-pan from the distribution board to other parts (i.e. Jaguars, Spikes, etc) as well as connection of the cRio are now being made. So with this wiring, the team was able to see a more realistic model of the robot.
There is one large subsystem with which we have had difficulty: the claw. The CAD team members have had to re-create a new claw and replace it with our old claw. We have also integrated pistons with the claw that will control the movement of the claw from a retracted position to an extended position.
Overall, CAD is working diligently to create the best model possible, and we are eager to
continue our work.
Business by Allison P.
This week, the Business Team worked mostly on the second ever edition of Team 341’s newsletter and on the 2012 Business Plan. We have finished the What We’ve Been Working On article for our newsletter. We are still working an article about our travel plans this season for our second newsletter. Also, a picture collage will be added to the first page of our newsletter. Once all articles and other touches are finished, our second edition can be released and sent to our team and sponsors! We hope the second edition will be even better than our first publication.
We have begun making updates to the InDesign version of the business plan based on the areas that we marked for revision last week. After we receiving more financial information, we will be able to update the budget section of the business plan. We have also made a few revisions to the Competitive Analysis section and hope to soon update it completely.
One of our main jobs is to track the team expenses. We will shortly begin to set up and create a
spreadsheet to log expenditures. We will be tracking expenses by project team; this will be organized by columns for the date of the expense, the amount, and the vendor. The creation of this spreadsheet will be able to help our team stay organized.
Media by Emily O.
As always, the media team has been hard at work on our weekly vlog. This week, we interviewed our programmer, James and mechanical team member Eli on our robot’s progress. We also have an interview with our media coach, Kirsten. Our humorous segment highlighted the numerous awkward moments in robotics. It is quite hilarious!
While some of us were working on the vlog, others were preparing the awards we give out to other teams during each competition. The imagery team (basically the media team with a few differences) were seen in the shop using jigsaws and sandpaper, preparing the bases for our awards. Others started stripping wires for the petals of our daisy awards, initially conceptualized by imagery leader Patrick.
The media team also focused on finishing and updating a few other odd jobs. Our donation video, started last year, is almost done. We are also focusing on revamping our pit posters so that they hold relevant content for our competitions. They will be printed soon! In preparation for the competition season, a few of us started brainstorming questions for scouting. We hope to finalize this information soon. Additionally, students worked toward their submission for the Woodie Flowers award focusing on their mentor of choice.
Web by Emily O.
Much of the energies of the web team were spent in the media category this week, but nonetheless a few changes were made. Our footer was updated with our new sponsors for this year. We created this in Photoshop and then uploaded it to the website. In addition, the Ramp Riot blog was written and posted with results from the competition. Late in the week, we realized that the viewer for our CAD models was broken. After a bit of problem-solving and searching we realized that a link in the code was broken and fixed this for all of the CAD models. The coming weeks will hopefully see more time dedicated to the site and more improvements.
