Proof of Concepts

Hey team! Today we had another day to get designs out. We had few groups even finish with well constructed proofs of concept to show how their design can work out in the real world. They were quite rudimentary and that is perfectly fine when it comes to proof of concepts. So we hope that we can get the rest of the proofs of concepts out pretty soon so that people can see similar ideas and start working to dimension and prototype them together.
And for all of us working on Onshape to CAD the designs be sure to work in the "2018 Robot" folder that Mr. E shared to us so that everyone can see your work.

Happy building 

Six-Wheel Omni Drive

Hey Team, we have ordered the components for a six-wheel Omni drive system for our 2018 robot. It will be constructed to test by January 20th (Saturday). We are also working to order all the parts to make a second version so we can compare different gear ratios. Once we get those components the team will need to construct with the base that we are preparing in the mean time.

Hey Team! Build season has officially began! so that means we need designs. Get on Onshape or get someone who can and get your ideas for our 2018 challenge out so the whole team an see.

Happy Designing!

A fast base for FIRST Power Up!

We are so excited to have shared our holonomic drive code with the FIRST community this year, and are looking forward to potentially using it for the FIRST PowerUp competition. For our strategy, speed will be very important this year so I want to try out the code with a six wheel omni drive. I've started to design a base for the robot using miniCIMs and 6" omni wheels, but I have tried to leave room for 8" wheels, if we feel that they would be a better choice.  I got the drive motors placed and I think I am ready for us to build a prototype base to outfit with the wheels and necessary components so we can hand it over to our programmers for a run through. This is just my idea, nothings final yet. Feel free to share your ideas and make any suggestions you may have.

-Rocky

FIRST PowerUp Day 1!

Kick-Off has come! The FIRST PowerUp Challenge is here! We started this morning with a big team potluck breakfast and lots of our mentors attending too. We are very excited about this year's challenge. We assigned people to groups to research all the rules of the game including penalties, robot restrictions, field set up, game rules, and match play. Once each group was confident in their knowledge of whichever topic they were assigned, they presented their detailed summaries to the everyone else. After everyone had a good understanding of everything we broke off into new groups and began discussing strategy. That lasted quite a long time. However, after a lot of debate, we have decided that our priorities for designing our robot will be the scale and climbing. This week is focused on prototyping proofs of concept. Our goal is to have a good idea of the preliminary design by the end of the day on Saturday so that we can spend the following week dialing the design in based on performance, constraints, weight distribution, materials selection, etc.  This is so exciting!

Remember, we are meeting every day after school, so if you are able to join us, we will be happy to have you there!  See you soon!

-Rocky

10/18 Meeting Summary

Hello Everybody, 

It's been a busy week with Homecoming and all. FTC was able to get out bases finalized and now have started of specifically designing the intake and holding of the foam blocks in the Relic Recovery Challenge. Along with the designs we reached the need of some rails to brace and hold up the stacking pillars on the FTC field. Now we gotta get Toasty fully put back together and get the intake for both Toasty and Moldy fully in CAD so we can start thinking of constructing it. As for FTC we need to get the intake designs finished and see how they can get incorporated into a good base. Have an awesome week guys!

- Adam

10/4 Meeting Summary

Hey guys! 

Toasty took quite a beating during the course of the competitions last year, so today we are were able to  get get him stripped of parts, sand down all the "problem areas" in his base -- primarily the from facing edges and corners -- , and we ever got all new layers of fiberglass back on those spots. So now Toasty is nice and strong again, but we still need to get some people in their to clean up the new layers of the fiberglass and just get it looking nice and pretty. 

- Adam