This past week we started figuring out what will work the best in this new challenge. This can be quite a chaotic process, but what is great about this, is that we learn... Most teams have students specialized in what they do best. But I honestly just love how our team works. We divide into separate groups and either research about West Coast driving or prototyping for a catapult or a wheeled shooter. But after a few hours of intense work, we come together as a team for lunch. We talk about what we did, what worked and what did not. Instead of one person knowing one thing. We take time to learn from each other and make sure that everyone knows everything about the robot that we are building . Last year, during regionals and sometimes during the championship in St Louis, I would walk around and see either a coach in charge of PR or a coach will step in to talk about the robot. We want to make sure that everyone on our team knows everything so anyone can speak about how are robot was designed and built. Another thing that I think is really important, is how we integrate rookie students to have an important role in this year's challenge. We don't want to push them out of our way and disregard their ideas. We want new minds to look at it in a different perspective. We don't just make them do the dirty work for us. As a matter of fact, I'm a veteran and the past few days I have been partly focused on cleaning that cold saw. Everybody does their part.

This past long weekend, we have made huge progress in completing prototypes for our shooter. We have it down to two ideas: a catapult or a wheeled shooter, and we have had a lot of success on both. What I think is also great, is that we have helped Brighton's rookie team , 5159 to figure out this year's challenge.

Personally, I've always been for Team catapult. I do believe that it is more complex, but I feel that it has great potential. What I've been trying to figure out this past weekend, is how to pull back the catapult arm with some sort of ratcheting system to hold it in place while the motor is off. First, I thought about getting a vex pro 2 cim 2 speed gearbox. And being the gearbox guru that I am, I decided to jump forward to the task. I took apart the whole gearbox and tried to find a way to incorporate a ratchet inside of it and also take out the high gear, add a neutral spot so when we shift the pneumatic gears, the ratchet will push over causing the gears inside to freely spin. Now this idea ended up not working, and people on chief Delphi have already beat me to the task. But that's what it's all about right? To learn from your mistakes.



Another way to bring the catapult arm down, is to get something like a boat crank and crank the arm down, and using a servo, push the release mechanism to let the crank spin freely. We have yet to find a way to pull the arm down, but we have made much success with manually pulling it down from the truss and scoring in the high goal. (insert facebook video of catapult scoring)
These past couple of weeks have been both great and stressful,but I am excited to see the outcome and I wish everyone the best!

-Reid Nebeker

Hey everyone, so here in robotics we have just completed week two of the six week build season. So far progress has been amazing. The long weekend has really let us catch up on our prototyping and allowed us to concentrate on putting together how we are actually going to build our robot. This weekend was completely robotics filled for some of the students on the robotics team. We had build sessions on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Monday, plus after the build session on Saturday we all gathered at Harris’s house to talk strategy and make some tough decisions. All together student and mentors together have put in over 200 hours of work time into robotics just this weekend. Those long workdays paid off however. This weekend we were able to shoot our first high goal. Not only with a catapult, but also with a prototyped wheeled shooter. Truthfully the catapult is slightly terrifying but amazingly ravenous (this means awesome in the Waterford Ravens robotics world). However that was not the only exciting thing that happened this weekend. We were also able to help Brighton build their drivetrain. This allowed them to drive their robot around the practice field for the first time and make their first goal in the low goal. Way to go 5159! We also had tons of visitors this week who got their names printed on the 3D printer, saw the prototyping of all of the shooters/pop-and-catchers, and were able to drive the robots!!!

Now here comes my favorite story of the week. It was kind of a uh-oh moment for the robotics team who were all excitingly getting ready to watch the drag race in the assembly hall between PRACTICE BOT, with a brand new 6 wheel drive train, and WATTY, last years robot that won in the Las Vegas regional. The countdown started….. 3…2….1…GO!!! PRACTICE BOT shot off and was going at high speed towards the other end of the field. WATTY however had a different idea. The robot zoomed backwards towards the stage and the drivers. It was a scary sight seeing WATTY driving towards us at full speed. But don’t worry, because of the hanger mounted on the robot, WATTY hung on the table placed in front of the drivers and started swinging, wheels fully off the ground. So no one got run over by a robot.

Overall it was an action packed week for the robotics team. This week has been full of hard work, laughs, bad drawings, prototyping, British comedies, and staying up until midnight discussing drivetrains and shooters.

Hey everyone!

This first week has been really exciting! It was filled with game analysis, strategy, pizza, design, prototypes, and more pizza. I’m impressed with the progress we’ve made so far because of how we've never made decisions or started prototyping so early in the build season. EVER. It will let me get in some more driver practice, which is GREAT! Aerial Assist, this year’s game, is going to challenge and bring the best out of our team for sure.

A quick thought most of us had to shoot the 2ft diameter ball into the high goal was to use a pneumatic piston punch. (PPP for short). The idea of a piston just punching a ball was too good not to build. Well, one of the many things that Mr. Harris has taught us is that we prototype in order to FF (Fail Fast), so that we don’t spend time with ideas which won't work..

Turns out we FF’d with the PPP and said OMG! and that was that. Here’s a vid of the PPP, which gave little actual punch.
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A critical point in our strategy discussions was deciding whether or not we had to floor load the ball. After some of my own hesitation, reluctance, and screams of bloody murder to do so, I changed my mind during an “exciting discussion”. A couple of days later a few students and I prototyped a floor loading mechanism similar to Team JVN’s “Robot in 3 Days”. It happened to be amazingly simple to build and the results were outstanding. Check out the attached video of it working! We’ll see if this design ends up finding a spot on our final robot. I think it’s a great option because of its simplicity and its ability to both suck in the ball and then spit it out into the low goal.

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As driver I’m super excited for this season but the pressure's definitely mounting up!

Well that's it from me, Gotta go practice driving!

-George Matus