Written by Jake T. and Sarah S.
In the second and third week of build season, the team has hit the ground running this year with explosive progress. With our alpha robot finished mechanically and electrically by the end of week one, the programming sub-team received a robot to work with over a month ahead of previous seasons, allowing them to experiment and test with crude mechanisms.
While the alpha robot was being completed, the remainder of the Robot Design & Build sub-team pushed on with prototyping and designing in CAD. After a grueling two weeks of design iteration, the robot’s various subsystems have nearly reached their final forms for the beta robot. In the upcoming week, we can expect each of these mechanisms to be mounted to the drive-base, wired, and handed off to the programmers for vigorous testing to determine potential areas for improvement before assembly of our competition robot commences.
As construction of the beta robot continues, the programming sub-team has been working ahead, developing code for it prior to completion to better optimize the time they’ll have with the robot next week. While they waited, the programmers were also able to test their code in their brand new simulation that they developed to test without needing a full robot. With the beta robot being radically different in architecture compared to the alpha robot, the simulation has been key to allowing the programmers to get a head start.
In Game Strategy land, members have been developing our scouting app for this season, optimizing the UI to maximize the ease of use so our scouts at competition can focus on the matches being played.
In the meantime, the Marketing & Outreach sub-team has also been hard at work on a variety of tasks relating to our team’s public image as well as judging materials. From working on our team’s business and sustainability plans to interviewing students to gather material for our team’s Woodie Flowers award submissions for coaches Kirsten and Sean, much progress has already been covered for our team’s non-robot award submissions. In addition to official awards, Marketing & Outreach has been working on our team’s publicity, making a video to be posted on our Youtube Channel which spotlights the team’s rookies, designing new pins to be given out to other teams at competition and community events, and making a new poster to be hung in the knuckle, the main foot traffic junction in our school.
As we approach the half-way point of build season, our team has been making great progress. Having set a much more aggressive schedule prior to Kickoff, the team has been working extremely hard and are weeks ahead of previous seasons. However, build season is far from over and if we maintain this pace, our team stands to be in a great position for our first competition at Hatboro-Horsham on March 1st.
