FRC 238 2018 Build Season Week 5 Newsletter

FIRST Robotics Competition Team 238
2018 Build Season Week 5 Newsletter

This has been a very productive week as the robot is nearly complete! With only a few minor changes to go we started having driver tryouts. We showcased Two-Face at the FTC state championship, and submitted our essay for the Chairman's Award.

The CAD team has been planning out and designing a co-climb feature. The co-climb will assist other teams in being granted a climb which is vital in obtaining ranking points. This week for the Mechanical team, one of the major things we finished was the assembly and attachment of both elevators.

We have begun the process of manufacturing and assembling the intake mechanism. We are manufacturing bumpers and the plumbing of pneumatics. The team decided to redesign the driver station board, so there have been people working on machining the parts for that. We also started manufacturing the climbing assembly and finished the machining of all of robot pieces.

This week the Electrical team began to wire the batteries that will be used this competition season. The elevator, along with its corresponding motors, were added to our robot, meaning that we have additional electrical projects to complete.

Currently we are figuring out how the wire will run up along our elevator to the intake motors without getting caught in moving parts.

The Software team has made good progress this past week. We have set up more commands for the robot’s actions and have assigned buttons on the joysticks to those actions. Some of these actions include using the intake elevator to raise and lower cubes, perform the final climb, and closing and extending the intake wrists. The code for the elevator in particular has been a success, and we are now working on setting values for the PID system.

The Chairman’s Award team successfully submitted the essay portion of the award before the deadline which was the 7th of February. We have now begun working on concepts for the video and presentation portions of the award.

This week we also volunteered to help set up for the FIRST Tech Challenge NH State Championship.

We also brought our robot from the 2017 game, Two-Face, so teams can see the type of robot a FIRST Robotics Competition Team builds.

We were able to speak with a variety of people about our robot and our team and even connected with the FTC team from our feeder middle school, Southside.

We are looking forward to mentoring them beginning this summer.

Finally, the students test their knowledge every year by having a quiz on the rules and penalties associated with this year's game FIRST Power up.

If students do well on the test they are eligible to be on the drive and scouting team. They are also eligible to obtain an ELO engineering credit.

If students passed the test they are allowed to tryout for the drive team. Each year our mentors test the students by presenting various tasks that they have to complete with the robot. The person who would complete these tasks the best, would be awarded the driver position. The operator tryouts are the next drive team position to be tested and that will happen when our intake system finishes revisions.

Sponsor Spotlight

The MuShield Co. has supported the Crusaders since 2013, when mentor Tommy joined the MuShield team. MuShield is a small company specializing in magnetic shielding with a global customer base. Their support of Team 238 began as a small but generous donation. That donation has grown through the years and now also includes access to manufacturing equipment. Focused in sheet metal fabrication, MuShield's contribution includes the use of fiber-optic laser cutters, press break forming, and traditional CNC machining centers (as well as Tommy himself). MuShield's sponsorship has allowed Team 238 to design increasingly complex parts and components, and therefore more intricate robot designs, all leading directly to higher levels of competitive play. Thank you MuShield!

Chipotle Fundraiser for FRC 238 this Sunday!