Build Season Week 3 has been exciting. The team is moving at a fast pace to develop a strategy and design and build a robot before our Week Zero practice competition on February 24th. 
Here are some of the highlights of the team’s accomplishments

Design Review

We had a design review where the team invited engineers, STEM professionals, and other experts to review the team’s plans, strategy, and designs. We have learned that design reviews are something that is commonly done in industry, especially before critical decisions are made.
The team came away with two pages of great feedback, notes, and changes to our robot’s design. The design reviewers’ recommendations ranged from very  specific, like adding a torsion spring to aid the intake mechanism, to universal design principles. The feedback helps the team validate and justify its current and future design decisions and build a more robust and consistent robot. Thank you to all of the professionals who donated their time and expertise and participated in the design review!

Drive Team Selection

Our strategy team administered written and driving tests to choose the best team members to be on the drive team. We are also working on choosing our pit technicians and scouts.

Build (Field Elements)

Unlike last year, the field elements are really huge (much larger than any door we have), and the build team creatively constructed them to come apart to make it easier to fit in our supply closet. In addition to the genius design, the construction of the field elements has been going at a rapid pace, with all but one element already complete. The last the field element should be finished by the start of Week 4, which means the programming, build, and drive teams have a full half field to test the design and code, and practice on.

Subteam Updates

Next, I’ll be doing a quick overview of what each team has been working on. Obviously, we could spend hours and hours talking about what we did but I’ve tried to boil it down to the key focus and wins

Strategy Team

This week, the Strategy Team has been very competition focused and will likely be strategizing for competitions until the end of the season

  • Administered the drive team written test and the driving test
  • Data driven analysis to determine the next strategies for scoring
  • Determining what data we need to collect from matches during competitions and coordinating with Programming on designing an app we can use for scouting
  • Work on defense strategies

Programming

One pod in Programming has been mainly focusing on the electronics side. We have really been working hard to make sure everything electronic related is reliable, including upgrading to a new power distribution hub (PDH) which allows us to have better power efficiency and control more motors, and upgrading our absolute encoder (the Pigeon) to the latest technology. The PDH will give us the ability to control nine more motors. We have also been making sure our robot’s wire management system is sound as well. We have been making wire harnesses to be able to quickly find and solve wiring problems during competitions, and quickly replace any damaged or faulty wiring.

Separate pods on the Programming Team have also been continuing to work on programming the shooter system, along with testing new swerve drive code and other miscellaneous code. New this year, we have carpet that we can use to test and drive the robot in real world conditions, which is exciting. Thank you to Team King Tec for donating it to us!

In collaboration with the Strategy Team, the Programming Team also demonstrated a mockup of the UI for the scouting app.

Operations

Besides keeping up with the rapid advances throughout the team and publishing this newsletter, Operations has been busy. This week we received training from one of our mentors on how to approach potential sponsors about sponsoring our team, and have started reaching out to local businesses to tell our story to them.

Build (the Robot Pods)

Our build team is divided into pods, and each pod has been working intensely, including to manufacture the chassis and prototype and test the intake, indexer, and shooting mechanisms. It was exciting to see our HaasCNC mill in operation and new build team members put their fresh training into practice. In addition, separate build pods are nearing completion on the field elements (see above), and also finalized a great design for our climber hook. Here are some CAD drawings of our current, preliminary design for the robot, which is being designed in our CAD program called Onshape:

Chicken Bot Pie would like to thank our sponsors for their support and encouragement. Without them, all of this would not be possible. Thank you!!

Until next week,
Milan Darji, Operations Captain
Celeste Hill, Head Coach
Minnetonka Robotics / Team 3082 / Chicken Bot Pie