At long last! Another post! In case you haven't guessed from the title of this post, a new season has started. I put the game reveal video on the ABOUT FIRST section of the blog, but I'll post it here as well. The actual game reveal starts at 3:35. Today is the first meeting after the kickoff. There's been some changes in team members. Jacob, Thomas, and Aaron have all left. The one new member is me. My name is Jane. Last week we assigned team roles. Benedict is Hardware Lead, Juan Diego is Master of the Notebooks, Veronica is Chief Coder, and I'm Social Media Director. Everyone will help build the robot and I'll help Veronica code. None of us went to the kickoff, but we did meet up at Benedict's and my house (we're siblings). Benedict was actually out of town, but JD, Veronica, and I all watched the game reveal and did some brainstorming. Benedict is at this meeting, and we all talked about different plans. We decided to go with a scoop that Benedict thought up. This was the sketch he drew to explain it. After that we talked about different options for what to attach the scoop to. The three options we were thinking of were an arm, a parallelogram, and drawer slides. We're going with the arm. The parallelogram would have worked best, but it's super complicated and we don't have time for that. Drawer slides aren't stable enough and because of the way the chassis is built it would be hard to pick up glyphs and put them in the crypto boxes. Speaking of the chassis, look how much work Benedict has done! Sorry that the photo is blurry. We're going to attach wheels (duh) but there's a problem with attaching them because the wheels are made for a different size axle. We're fixing this by getting some plates and getting some parts of some sort made. These haven't arrived yet so we haven't put on the wheels yet.
That's about everything. I'll try to post with weekly updates from the meeting, more if we do something outside of meeting hours.
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This is a summary of things individual team members want to do during this off-season.
1. Learn Java 2. Teach Java to team members. 3. Increasing motivation. 4. Recruitment. 5. Create season game plan. 6. Apply talents to team. 7. Coordinate summer plans. 8. help others develop skills. 9. Inventory parts. 10. Purchase history. 11. Increase meeting productivity. 12. Organize storage of parts and tools 13. Get sponsors/fundraisers. 14. Teach GitHub to team members. 15. Build a chassis. 16. Programming manual. 17. Learn GitHub. 18. New Notebooks. 19. Improve robotics skills. 20. Learn CAD. 21. Outreach to St. Jerome Academy. 22. Visiting Engineering labs. 23. Finish sizing cube. 24. Build charging station for competitions. Our team currently has 6 members and 2 or 3 will be leaving next year. In addition we are in need of a mentor.
We invite you to join and grow with us! We meet in Hyattsville, MD. on Fridays during the day. Potential Members and Mentors. We offer an opportunity to learn STEM applications. We build and program robots during competition season. We organize fundraisers and outreach during off-season. Our last mentor was awesome and we would be glad to have another like him. Experienced, guiding, encouraging, and unsparing in his analysis. If you would like to know what we're planning on doing over the summer, read our Summer Plans post. If you would like to learn more, have ANY questions or have ANY advice, contact us! I'm hoping to vlog for the team over the summer. I've been interested in film for a few months now, and I'm hoping that I'll be able to test it out a bit by vlogging. I was playing around with a camera at today's meeting and I came out with a little video clip in about two hours. So obviously it's not very good. Still, it was fun to make and it has some good sides. I was sort of thinking it would be an intro/outro something for a vlog. So here it is: Like I said, it needs work. But I think it shows promise! Leave a comment and tell me what you think!
I have NOT been keeping up.Sorry about that. In summary: We managed to finish the robot! It was actually finished the day before competition. So that was scary. I forgot to take any pictures during the qualifier. Sorry about that! :/ I'll try to remember next time. That's the robot just after the competition. The two biggest things from competition: We need a bigger sprocket for the grabber motor, and we need to use competition balls. Why? Because we realized that the flapper isn't strong enough to pull the balls up. This is still harder because the balls we were using are matte plastic. The competition balls are glossy plastic, so they're a lot more slippery. So we weren't able to score in the basket. Also some of the gears are grinding on the wheels, and the wheels aren't all on one plane. So we can't use the holonomic system for autonomous. Still, we won the motivate award! We think it was mostly Aaron's doing, he's been maintaining our twitter account and using relay chats throughout the week. So he's pretty cool for that. That's the list of tasks we want to accomplish before next qualifier. We've already done some of them. I'll try to keep you posted as we complete more!
QualifiersWe've nailed down which qualifiers we're attending! We'll be competing in the December 10th qualifier at Sidwell Friends' high school, and the Jan 21st at the Naval Academy. Hopefully we'll see you there! We have started our cards fundraiser, and to buy some contact [email protected] Here are photos of what they look like. We also donated all our old Lego bins from years ago to a school. So, less stuff to keep track of, and brownie points! :D We unfortunately don't have pictures of the actual drop off, and they've somehow escaped all photography over the last 5 years or so. But it's the standard Lego NXT bin.
Well, so much for posting next week. Our main blogger wasn't at the meeting, or the one after that. But now we're posting. We don't have many pictures, only three were good/not duplicates. But, here they are: It's a photo of the step gears. Another one, I guess. It's a bit better than the last one. More pics of the wheels. We added zorbathane for more grip. And we have new wheels, Andymark 4 inch stealth whels. The motors are mounted onto aluminum flats. We might change that, it looks a little shaky. In other news, we have the chassis assembled, and two wheels on it! It sort of works, although some of the holes aren't in the right place.
So, the new season! We've decided to go for shooting balls into the basket, parking in places, and bumping buttons. We don't think bumping buttons will need a special piece, so we'll just make sure that the robot has a hard piece on back. We came up with a pretty wacky chassis design.
We're going to have a fundraiser starting next week, selling cards. So tell everyone you know, and we'll post a link so you can support us and get great deals on greeting cards.
That's caught up to today. We'll blog again next week, with more pics and updates. Hooray! We're back in business!! And tech, of course. The website is updated with the new pictures of the current team members, and we'll come out with an actual blog post about what we've done soon.
HmphWe're going to give a demonstration to Bsi soon. We'll bring our robot to show them and tell them about the season. Aaron and Thomas are hoping to get some advice about cameras and microphones for a video project they're working on. So keep an eye out around kickoff, we'll put it out about then. For now, check out the robot we'll be demoing. ... ... Never mind! I can't get the video properly. If I can I'll post a video later.
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AuthorWe are the Droids, and we'll be keeping you updated on our progress. Archives
February 2019
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