by The Hitchhikers | Feb 3, 2019 | Build season
During Week 4, our Mechanical Team finished attaching our lifting mechanism and the battery holder to our chassis and have begun to build a few things for the mechanism we are using for manipulating the cargo and hatches. On our Programming Team, they worked on fine-tuning our vision system on our practice bot, Frankie, and are currently waiting to test their code on our actual 2019 robot.
Over on the business and marketing side of the team, the Chairman’s write-up was finished and the designs for the back of the shirt, cart panels, and the banners were completed. The front design of the shirt are in its final stages, and the fridge magnets are almost done. This week, they also started to work on the mice we hand out at competitions.
This week, we also had one of our alum visit us, giving us the opportunity to sit down and catch up with a nice cup of tea!
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 | Mar 2, 2018 | Build season
Week 6 was spent getting everything ready before for the end of build season. During this week, our main goals were to rebuild our carriage, which broke at the end of Week 5 during testing, and spend time calibrating our code. Thankfully, none of our leads got sick during this week, so things ran a little smoother!
This time around, we were able to rebuild our carriage with the design changes in three days! While it was not enjoyable and did nothing good for our health to have our carriage break at the end of Week 5, in the end, our carriage ended up better than it was! Needless to say, we are extremely happy (and relieved) about that!
On the day of Bag and Tag, we were able to meet at one of our student’s church. The room they lent to us gave us much more space to actually test our robot. Finally, we were finished with testing and our 2018 robot, Grunthos, was bagged and tagged!
Now we are powering up for our first competition at the Pitt County District Event on March 9-11!
by The Hitchhikers | Feb 15, 2018 | Build season
Over the past four weeks, we have run into a few problems: bad weather, equipment breaking, and illness to name a few. Fortunately, we did not panic and remained on schedule through hard work and diligence. This week, we had another problem. We hoped that we would be able to power through it and stay on schedule, but it was not to be the case. At the beginning of Week 5, one of our co-captains got sick, so he had to miss the entire week. Just like when our Robot Lead was sick, we were able to manage without one of our co-captains, but it was not a fun situation to be in again.
In addition to illness, we also had a few difficulties with our cube collector and cube delivery system, which is an elevator. Early on this week, the main part of the elevator was mounted on our robot. All that was left was to finish building the carriage. Unfortunately, we messed up up that small, essential part at least three different times during its construction. Finally, after several lessons were learned, it was complete and ready for testing!
As we were testing the system near the end of the week, it unexpectedly came crashing down. Hard. Needless to say, that crash was disastrous, breaking and bending parts of the system. As a result, we had to fix parts of the system and completely reconstruct the carriage. We did panic a little at the prospect of having to rebuild the carriage because it took us so long the first time, but we changed the design and some of our best students working on it! The design modification will also be more durable and fix our problem with the cube collector, killing two birds with one stone. We are optimistic that we will have it finished before bag and tag! Looking at it even more optimistically, we are grateful that it broke now rather than breaking it at competition and trying to fix it then!
We have also been having some complications with weight. Some of the robot parts are quite heavy, so we have had to keep a close eye on our weight. A couple of times, we have had to make small modifications to keep within the weight limit. At the end of the week, we were under the limit, so we should be good!
Recent Comments