It has been a great week! I learned how to calculate gear ratios and put gear boxes together with Kayli, learning that nothing is simple in robotics; we didn't have the right parts so we ended up putting the gear box together with some rubberbands we found in the chem lab... This was for the chassis team to visualize how much space they would need for it, but once we brought it to them they had disassembled the chassis! Ah well, at least we calculated the speed for a few different configurations and they picked the one they wanted.

More recently I worked with the bopper team. Our goal is to create a modular robot, which will give us the ability to change our strategy for different games, most likely a bopper and a wheeled shooter. The bopper would be used to pass the ball softly over the truss for another robot or ourselves to catch it. We tested different types, sizes, and amounts of wheels, testing how high the ball was thrown, and how accurately. When I left on Friday they were testing smaller wheels with a gap inbetween to guide the ball.

From what I've heard we met our goal to have the robot driving by 4 on Friday! The chassis team has been working hard to finish this week, and the electronics team designed the electronics and added it on. This is great because now we will have a lot of practice driving which is one of the five P's: prepared!

Overall it's been a successful week. I'm so glad that I'm doing robotics this year, it's been great learning about all the different systems and getting to know everyone, and don't forget about the well stocked food cabinet! Good luck everyone in these next two weeks before the stop build day!

-Alex Bruce

Hey everyone!

Week three was very fun for me and we have made a bunch of key decisions that have helped us in our prototyping stage. During this week we have decided to drop the catapult idea and go with the wheeled shooter instead. The advantage of having a wheeled shooter is that we can try to incorporate it with the intake which is also using wheels. Also the wheeled shooter is less dangerous!

This week was full of prototyping and we have even started to build our Final chassis. Our team has decided to go with the “West Coast Drive” system with 6 wheels. This is the first year of using this system but already seems promising.

The CAD team has made a lot of progress this week they are now successfully printing small designs and names for our guests. This is a big step forward for our team because we can now print models of our robots and design custom parts to get made at the store.

During week three I have learned a lot of new things including how to use the bandsaw the drill press and even the cold saw! I found these new experiences really fun and exhilarating. With the bandsaw I cut one of the cams that we might be using in our popper idea. I also used the cold saw to cut steel to use on the seesaw arm of the popper.

Overall week three has been very successful and our team is moving at a record pace! We plan to keep moving forward and to be ready for Utah regionals in just a few short weeks!

-Hunter Sullivan

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