FRC 238 2018 Build Season Week 2 Newsletter

FIRST Robotics Competition Team 238

2018 Build Season Week 2 Newsletter

Week two of build season has been busy with finalizing robot design, manufacturing of robot parts, prepping code and our major award submissions.

Technical Division

The CAD team has been hard at work finalizing robot design, completing major mechanisms and the drawing packages for each individual part. Dozens of drawing packages have been created and sent to the mechanical team, as each consists of a technical drawing and the steps needed to complete each part. Our 3D Printer has also been hard at work printing spacers and other elements for various robot components.

The Mechanical team has continued to manufacture all of the aluminum stock that will be used on our robots. We have already sent a batch of material to be powder coated for our competition robot. We have also assembled all of our gearboxes that will be used on the robots this year.

The Electrical team has started to place and wire components on the drivetrain for our practice robot for the 2018 season. We also began to work on making our 2016 robot “Tumbler” operational again and we plan on using that robot as a defense bot in driving practice this season.

The Software team spent this week migrating older code to the new Phoenix framework as well as setting up speed control to integrate with new a new motion control program that came into our possession.

Operations Division

The Operations team has been working on completing our 2018 business plan to submit for the Entrepreneurship Award. We created a new template this year to try to get the most important information in there. More information about our team, our community outreach, and our goals have been added to our business plan to give anyone who is reading it more insight into our team.

Community Division

This week our Chairman’s Award team has made great progress on our submission for this award. Even though we are still in the planning stages, we have gone from bullet points of ideas to fully formed paragraphs. Our overall theme for the submission (The Crusader Calculation) has been developed further and expanded this week and has grown into a sturdy essay structure. The Crusader Calculation is based on our team number and logo. We talk about how the efforts of the Technical and Operations teams (2), raised to the power of three major efforts of the Community team (3), results in 8 major impacts that Team 238 has on our surrounding community. Our preliminary essay draft is on par with our set progress schedule and we hope that the rest of the award submission will follow that pattern.

Read more about FIRST Robotics Competition awards here: https://www.firstinspires.org/resource-library/frc/submitted-awards

Sponsor Spotlight

Texas Instruments is Team 238’s longest running sponsor and has been supporting our team since 2003 when we participated in TI’s Kid’s Technology Day by bringing our robot and the rest is history. The funding that TI provides covers a good portion of our robot build cost. TI has helped the team not only with funding but with mentors over the years. They also provided the team with space to run our post kickoff design sessions when we could not access the school. TI has also invited the team to their Manchester site to participate in site tours, so the students can learn about the products TI creates. The team also presents to TI staff each year including a demo of the robot. Thank you Texas Instruments!!