Build Season Week 4

Subteam Highlights

Operations

Operations has been continuing to focus on the weekly newsletter and competition awards. The deadline for many awards is looming, currently, the team is most focused on the Impact Award. FIRST’s Impact Award focuses on teams that embody the spirit of raising awareness and access to science and technology.

Women in STEM

The team is committed to increasing the participation of women on the team and in STEM. This season the number of women on the team has more than doubled

Our team had a breakout session for girls on the team to interact with women mentors from the team. To get into the spirit of the ideal, they made bracelets for the S.W.I.F.T. Initiative. They discussed how competitions work with new students on the team, and discussed plans to increase the number of girls and women on the team in the future. This led to plans to meet on a monthly basis to support girls and mentors learning skills on different subteams.

Build

Drivetrain and Control System

Building our new swerve drivetrain modules is complete. Along with that, the wiring of the modules and basic power distribution is done. A new mentor stressed the importance of having neat wiring harnesses to easily troubleshoot any problems and replace wires quickly if needed during competition.

Field Elements

The last of the field elements is complete. This season might be the fastest we have built the field elements. They are large and some of our members are working on finding the ultimate arrangement to fit everything into our supply closet neatly without blocking access to anything important.

CAD

The latest CAD design of our robot is shown below!

General Build team updates

Students completed the base part of the chassis and did more testing of our intake and shooter. The build team has been particularly excited about our CNC mill. We have been being trained on it and have fabricated some amazing parts.

Strategy

The team is working on data collection, management, processing, and analysis in order to make informed decisions at tournaments on our strategies. They have a group of technical mentors helping them with all aspects of thinking about designing their system. 

Drive Team

Our human players on the Drive Team have been practicing throwing the notes onto the microphone. It is a challenging 16 foot toss onto a tiny target that is like a one foot tall pole that’s 7 feet in the air.

Programming

Part of our programming team was tasked with completing the basic wiring for our drivetrain. The rest of Programming has been working on our Vision and Autonomous code. One of our teammates has been working on a really cool motion profiling system that will allow our robot to pick the optimum path between many points using advanced math.