In week 3, we disassembled our old robot from last year’s competition this week.. Speaking of our progress, Team 3082 is keeping up with our project management timeline, and  our progress is described below. Coming up, we have a Week Zero competition on February 23rd, where we will be able to test this year’s design against other local teams in practice matches and gather valuable data about our robot’s performance. It is an opportunity to network and learn how other teams approach this season’s challenge and showcase our robot.

Mechanical 

We have completed our competition chassis and wired all of the subsystems. The bumpers have been partially completed in preparation for the Week Zero competition. Some newer members designed and built a sign out of our team number, 3082, using wood and string lights, that we are excited to showcase at the Week Zero competition! We are working on field elements that mimic what the competition field will be like, and finished building the scoring grid, the first of the three field elements. Finally, we began building the charge station, the second field element  on which we will be balancing our robot at the end of the match and is worth a lot of points. 

Programming

We started designing a button board to control the robot in the field. After considering many options, we decided to have 27 buttons corresponding to different locations on the field, and 36 buttons in total. This lessens the prominent pressure the robot driver and operator face by automating more functions. The programming team also started working with pneumatics, and writing code to measure air pressure. Along with that, we started working on the arm and grabber code that will allow us to grab scoring pieces and prevent our arm from violating the maximum extension rule.

Business 

Our Business Team has been working hard to support our team by designing merchandise, and updating our team website. We are working with our resident videographer to capture this year’s build season into cinematic form. The team will soon be submitting its application for the FIRST Impact Award, which covers our team’s impact in our community and how we spread the values of the international organization FIRST.

Design Review 

During our most recent, in-house design review before the whole team, we presented the pros and cons of the conceptual design options we are considering. In a team vote, we chose a two jointed arm design. We also discussed the pros and cons of our grabber prototypes. We are still determining what grabber design we will use, but we had important discourse on what prototype filled our needs the best and plan to finalize our design next week. 

Next Steps

  • Mechanical: working on pneumatics, building superstructures 
  • Code: robot configuration and calibration of constant variables
  • Business: design, competition merch