by The Hitchhikers | Jan 27, 2019 | Build season
Week 3 was full of building and testing stuff! It started off with a bang by drinking some tea and driving our completed chassis around, and for the rest of the week, our Mechanical Team focused on building the mechanism to get the balls and hatches into the rockets and cargo ships, and prototyping other ways to grab the game elements.
Our Programming Team has also continued to make great progress toward getting our robot code done. They have completed code for our collector and our mechanism to move the balls and hatches. Additionally, they have continued to work on their vision system and fixed the issue with the cameras not displaying due to networking problems.
As for our business team, we focused on putting the final touches on our cart and t-shirt designs in Illustrator. In addition to the 3D printed thumb pins, we have begun construction on handmade fridge magnets. The designs we are creating are little 42s and Babel Fish. We initially tried to make thumbs and dolphins, however, it did not work out as expected. We also have continued to mess around with designs for computer stickers.
by The Hitchhikers | Jan 25, 2019 | Build season
At the start of Week 2, we were hard at work making a CAD (Computer-Aided Design) model of our robot and continuing to prototype different robot mechanisms, including the hatch and cargo collector. After a few days, we had a more concrete CAD model of this year’s robot with space left for improvements and design changes. On our Programming Team, they finished updating our practice bot, Frankie, and tested driving code. They also spent a lot of time working on our vision system.
On the business and marketing side of the team, our team focused on finishing a draft of the Chairman’s write-up and updating our pit banners and robot cart. Continuing from the first week, we also spent quite a bit of time playing with ways to replace the buttons handed out at competitions with items that are cheaper and more unique to our team. Right now, we have decided to go with 3D printed thumb pins and handmade (but cheap and easy to make) fridge magnets. We also started to play with the idea of designing computer stickers to hand out.
Near the end of the week, we were able to go to Hangar6’s facility to construct parts of our chassis. Getting to precision cut our belly pan using a laser cutter was definitely a highlight of our visit! At the end of the week, we completed the main frame of the chassis, and we hope to get our gearboxes and wheels connected to the frame in the next few days!
by The Hitchhikers | 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.
by The Hitchhikers | 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!
by The Hitchhikers | Aug 1, 2018 | Competitions
Apart from using THOR, Thundering Herd of Robots, as training for newer students, we were also able to use the off-season competition we helped start in 2013 to test how our driver candidates performed under pressure and how well different combinations of drive teams functioned.
With a few practice matches under our belts to calibrate Grunthos, our 2018 robot, to the field and give a few of our drivers practice, the qualification matches started. Despite a slightly rough start, including having our encoders pop out of place for at least the third time again this season and our elevator getting stuck at the top for most of a match, we managed to recover from our rough start and began to climb the rankings, finishing strong in both robot performance and driver candidates! The latter was especially surprising because some of the drivers we were testing had never even touched Grunthos’ controls before THOR. At the end of qualification matches, we were able to assess the drive team combination that would work best and ended the matches ranked 1st!
Soon after, it was time for Alliance Selections, and we ended up picking an alliance that consisted of Team 5190, Green Hope Falcons, and Team 4829, Titanium Tigers! After a quick lunch and strategy meeting with our alliance partners, playoff matches began. It took a couple of matches, but our alliance eventually established a rhythm and at the end of playoffs, we had won THOR for the first time in our team history!
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