Week 5 has come and gone. One more week before we enter competition season. We’ve got plenty left to tackle, and are excited to dive deep and finish our build season strong.
Besides building our robot this week, several team members and mentors headed to Madison to participate in FIRST Advocacy Day at the Capitol. FIRST teams from across WI gathered to advocate for an expansion of the WI DPI Robotics League Participation Grant from $1.5 million bi-annually to $4.5 million bi-annually, and to expand the access to this Grant to K-12 instead of its current access which is only grades 6-12. We met with members of the Assembly and Senate, including Jessie Rodriguez, Bob Donovan, and one of Chris Larson's staffers. Then on Wednesday, the team got to meet Senator Larson when he stopped in to visit our build space!
Programming team got a lot done this week. We worked on overhauling our GitHub committing procedures, fixing label issues, and managing branches. We’re committed to our control system for this season, and have defined some of the basic commands for our robot. Although we’ve come across some issues with control inversions and the gyro on our Alpha bot, we’ve now fixed the problems. We’ve also planned autonomous paths for the competition season. Lastly, we’ve started to implement MotionMagic from Phoenix 6 to help us control our elevator easier on our robot.
Assembly has fully attached everything to the robot and gave it to the electrical team. However, we’ve had to take off the climber temporarily to iterate on it.. We've finished the driver's station and we have also started on creating bumpers. We're starting to work on our robot cart as well.
Fabrication has cut a lot of new parts for the robot to keep the robot lightweight. We did this for parts of our Climber, End Effector, and other assembly pieces on the robot. We have also worked with 2506 Saber Robotics and cut out parts for them!
Design has continued to push out parts and resolve any issues that we’ve run into. We’ve been reducing the weight of the robot by implementing finite element analysis, which is a software to simulate the stress in the robot, and if there is no stress in the part they will remove the material.
Electrical has wired all manipulators on the robot, now they can push it through diagnoses and start work on the button box.
Scouting has finalized metrics and scouting forms have been made, our sheets for scouting have been created and are being developed. We have set up our match predictor. A big win was being able to pull photos from forms to sheets. This allowed us to complete our new and improved team data tab.
We also did a interview with... ourselves?? Watch the Business interview below!
Then be sure to checkout the flyer for our upcoming Robot Reveal Night!
