This pass week our team made some very important decisions that will determine the course of the rest of the season. Mr. Harris gave us a packet with his suggestions on what we should do, a Mentor's Perspective. He did not force us to do anything he let the student decide for themselves. Last Thursday the veteran team members went to into a room and made these important decisions. Mr. Harris had warned us that these decisions would be hard and we would come out the meeting sad and angry that our personal ideas had not come through. However this did not happen. The decisions were not too hard and no one came out of the room angry or sad. The first decision we made was that we needed a ball popper that can pop the ball over the truss. We also decided that this system should be modular because it would help us in the higher level of competition that St. Louis and Las Vegas require. Next we decided that we will do a West Coast style drive train. This is a new style of drivetrain and we wanted to use it this year because it is new and will give us an opportunity to learn something new. I personally wanted to use this drivetrain because it is my last year of Robotics. I want to do as many new things I can before I graduate. We also decided to go with a 3 CIM dual speed gear box to give George more options while driving and quicker accelerations. Our final decision was the type of shooter to go with. This seemed like a hot and controversial issue because we had two teams working on a catapult and a wheeled shooter. Surprisingly, the decision was easy. We all went with the wheeled shooter even though the catapult had scored from half field. While this seems odd, as a main designer and prototyper of the wheeled shooter the catapult was not the way to go. The main reasons for this were first the cranking mechanism to crank back the catapult needed a lot of torque because of all the force required to shoot the ball, and second the system to crank the catapult would have been to meet our performance goal of shooting 2 balls in autonomous. I am also happy with this decision because now the catapult is a very dangerous and powerful toy.
-Aalaap Narasipura