Written by Hannah Y.
What has Team 341 been up to in the second week of our build season?
Exciting news! The Woodie Flowers Award and Dean’s List Nominees have been officially announced—congratulations to Sean Stevens and Kirsten Jahn Richardson for Woodie Flowers, and Kevin G. and Jake T. for Dean’s List!
The Marketing & Outreach subteam has been striking all the right chords of productivity, composing the much-anticipated video recap of our first two weeks of the season This video will encapsulate the team’s collective efforts, featuring prototypes, game strategy, and more. Some members have been busy conducting interviews and are continuing to edit the video. In addition to this video, they are busy working on our new daisy pins that are being specially made to fit this year’s game theme. The pins are basically done, with the design of Miss Daisy at a turntable making sick beats. In addition, they have been hard at work, putting the finishing touches on the Impact Award executive summaries and refining the essay. An upcoming event, a “Dine and Donate” at PJ Whelihan’s in Blue Bell, PA will be held on February 5th. It’s open to everyone so come and join us!
Over in electrical, the focus has been on assembling and wiring eight new batteries for upcoming competitions, mounting the Limelight onto our Kitbot, and diagnosing issues with our aging Sparky demonstration robots.
The Programming empire made a new four- and six-piece autonomous path for the Kitbot. In addition, they set up a Limelight to localize the Kitbot’s position on the field with autopath. The programming team is continuing to work on the control system for the next generation of Sparky Robots – focusing on motor control and communication between Arduino and raspberry pi.
Meanwhile, our application that we use to scout other teams at competition is undergoing enhancements, with a keen eye on refining code organization and improving our visualizations. Various subsections for the website—HTML, JavaScript, and CSS—are being implemented to enhance code comprehension. The app is also adapting to this year’s interests, incorporating new buttons, graphs, and a user-friendly graphical interface for efficient scouting during competitions.
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Now what was happening in our shop?
With the drivebase, our team members created several different configurations and versions of the drivebase giving us flexibility for the final robot. All CAD files were sent to our fabrication sponsor, Computer Components Corporation (CCC) last Friday. We feel very lucky to have CCC on board as a sponsor again this season!
For the team focusing on the intake, they tested out different wheels: vertically oriented, mecanum, belts, etc. They CADed the entire “under the bumper” portion of the intake, and worked on the “beaver tail” type intake. The beaver tail intake is a prototype for the robot, that centers the game piece into the center of the robot.
The Amp group built a virtual four bar and static arm this week, to score the note into the trap and the amp, and eventually decided to pursue the virtual four bar.
As for the climber, our team members continue to make improvements that are looking promising from the previous week. The climber with the trap is one of the hardest engineering challenges for this year’s game, as we focus on climbing on the chain in the field and scoring in the trap.
So far, Team 341’s progress is looking promising!!!
