2019 FRC 238 Bits and Bytes: Build Season Week 6

2019 FRC 238 Bits and Bytes:

Build Season Week 6

In the rush that is the final week of build season, our subteams have been busy. The shop has been open for eight consecutive days in preparation for “Bag Day” on Tuesday the 19th. “Bag Day” is the deadline for competition robot construction after which we only have six hours to work on the robot in the week before our competitions. After “Bag Day” the team will continue to meet regularly to prepare for our competitions.

Technical Division

CAD

This week we finally finished designing the robot, and have been printing out drawings and travelers for Mechanical to build. The trickiest part has been the piston geometry for articulating the intake. It was incredibly difficult to find the right piston for the job, and where to place them was no piece of cake, either. This season has been challenging, mainly because everyone in CAD is new; resulting in all of us having to learn Onshape on the fly. Despite these setbacks, we are ready for competition season.

Mechanical

This build season we’ve spent longer than usual prototyping mechanisms for the robot and also machining parts and powder coating. The CAD team has had to remake and revise parts, which resulted in taking more time. As of this past week, we have been occupied with drill pressing, deburring and milling pieces. We plan to continue milling untouched pieces and working on the functionality of both the practice and competition robot.

Electrical

There have been many differences from last season for the Electrical team’s work. For one, we decided to use zip ties and dual lock to secure our components. We did this to make repairs simpler to remove in general when needed. Also, Electrical made a tower to hold our motor controllers due to the limited space on the physical board. We hope that our experimenting with these concepts can be used in the future to make managing the electrical board easier. As of this past week, we have been finishing the wiring on the practice robot and have started wiring the competition bot. This task included making the wires neater and more organized. By the end of the week, we wish to complete the wiring of the practice robot.

Software

The software team has been working on making a preliminary implementation of a vision system. We will continue to fine tune the drive train and elevator algorithms in preparation for competition season. We are close to competition ready but will need to improve upon our software throughout the season.

Community Division

We have taken a step towards achieving one of our season goals: “Submit a Chairman’s Award we are proud of”. We have already submitted the Chairman’s essay and executive summaries, which took a lot of hard work and commitment to complete. As of right now, we are working on the outline of our Chairman’s video submission and also focusing on writing for the Entrepreneurship award. This year’s Entrepreneurship award has taken some adjusting to, especially since it is different from years’ past. Instead of being able to write and make the submission as large as we’d like, teams are now being held to a 3-page maximum. This has been a challenge, considering our submission was nearly thirty pages long last year.

While in search of new sponsors and contacting old ones, we prepared for our presentation to the Memorial Booster Club requesting $1,000 to be put towards our traveling expenses. Our request was graciously accepted. Due to our efforts, two new sponsors have also been added to our list: St. Mary’s Bank and GTI Spindle Technology. Thank you to our sponsors for all their support!