2019 Build Season: Kickoff and Week 1

2019 Build Season: Kickoff and Week 1

by | Dec 20, 2018 | Build season

This 2019 season, FIRST NC invited our team along with Team 7763, Carrborobotics (our mentee team), to attend a special Kickoff at Hangar6 sponsored by Caterpillar. At Kickoff, we were able to talk with and learn from NC FRC judges and Caterpillar while bonding with Carrborobotics more. After an hour of networking, it was finally time to reveal the 2019 game, Deep Space.

Deep Space is a game where two teams composed of three robots work to deliver disks (called “hatches”) and balls (called “cargo”) to either a cargo ship or two rockets. Unlike previous games, there is no dedicated pre-programmed autonomous period. Instead, teams may decide to let their drivers control their robots like in teleop. The catch is that the drivers’ vision will be limited due to a black screen that covers the driver station view for the first fifteen seconds of a match. This is called the “sandstorm period.” During the last thirty seconds, robots may pick one of three platform heights to climb to earn extra points. The higher the level climbed, the more points the alliance gets.

Shortly after the game reveal, we took a break for lunch and then met up at a mentor’s house to continue Kickoff in a quieter and more focused place. After gathering together at our mentor’s house, we broke up into several groups (which helps eliminate groupthink) to read the rules, discuss game strategy, and come up with a basic robot design. Once every group had a basic plan in place, we all got together and had each group present their strategy and robot design. By the end of the day, we had a basic idea of how we wanted to play the game!

Continuing our momentum from Kickoff into the start of build season, we spent the first week refining our game strategy and robot design. Once we had a better idea of how we wanted to play Deep Space, we started prototyping a few of our ideas. The main things we worked on testing were our cargo and disk collector and mechanism ideas for end game. So far, we have a general design for our robot and are eager to see how the rest of the season goes!

Our Business and Marketing Teams were also hard at work during Week 1. They started the process of designing new team shirts for this season. By the end of the week, they finalized a shirt design and started to draw it in Illustrator! Additionally, they began to work on the Chairman’s write-up and experimented with different ideas to replace the buttons handed out at competitions.

2018 Apex Christmas Parade

2018 Apex Christmas Parade

by | Dec 5, 2018 | Off Season

For three years, we participated in the Cary Christmas Parade, spreading the message of FIRST to hundreds of people. The last two years, however, we decided to participate in Apex’s Christmas Parade instead. As late October and November rolled around, we began to prepare for our annual tradition.

Like previous years, we worked on incorporating elements from past games into our float. This year, we kept our geared 42s that we had last year and the train theme, but we updated the game elements that we used as presents, deciding to use a combination of the totes from 2015 and the cubes from the 2018 game. As the Apex Christmas Parade is at night, we also worked on decorating our float and robots with lights. Learning from last year, we added more lights to the robots and float and adjusted the positioning of the lights to make things more visible. A few meetings later, the float was finished.

On the day of the parade, the weather did not look promising. It was cold and wet (though that did not stop us from engaging in our favorite team game, Ultimate!), and we were not sure whether we would be able to run our robots. The wet conditions also meant that shooting frisbees and balls would not work well. Fortunately, we were still able to drive our robots with no damage to our electrical, and we also had less communication problems with our robots as a result of switching our robots over to an arduino system.

After packing up and hiking through the rain to a pick up location and then having to hike to another location, the day ended. The next day, we spent our time drying out our robots and treating them. Overall, the experience was fun, and we had several people recognize us from last year and telling us how impressed they were with us!