Hello all! Welcome back once again, we hope you had a wonderful weekend. This week, we’re putting any final touches onto our robot and overall team plan before the competition next week. The robot is just about finished, and we are in the final stages of preparing it and the drivers for the competition atmosphere.
The Build Team: Today, the Build Team is finalizing the robot fully. With the major assembly dealt with, all that’s left is wiring and general maintenance of the robot as the programmers begin to play with it. For the most part, after our finishing touches today, the Build Team will be taking somewhat of a secondary role for the next week or so. They will mostly be testing the robot and then beginning last second repairs/improvements, as well as doing some drive training.
The Programming Team: This week, the Programming Team finally gets their hands on the actual robot itself. It’s been a long time coming, but they have well prepared themselves for this moment. Not only will they be building the code for the driving aspect of the bot, they will also be training new drivers and generally practicing with the new form of movement. As we mentioned back during pre-season, this year we shifted from mecanum wheels to tank drive. This is pretty different for us, especially because we have no veteran drivers who have used this method of movement, meaning that its a fresh start for basically everyone. On the bright side, it will be a great learning experience, as well as good practice for next year. Outside of drive, we will also be beginning work with the gyroscope we recently ordered, which should allow us to detect the robot’s orientation, which, in turn, should give us an advantage in autonomous.
The Business Team: This week, the Business Team hopes to tie up any loose ends with sponsorship outreach, financial management, and the FIRST Impact Video. With almost all of the award work done, the Business Team is in a relatively lax spot compared to earlier in the season. They hope to be fully finished with the planning and filming of the video by Tuesday, which should give us enough time to edit and check over the final product.
That just about does it for today. We’ll see you at the end of the week with another small update. One quick heads up before we leave: there will be no blog posts next week, as the team will be focusing entirely on drive training and finishing the bot before the competition, which starts on Friday and goes through the weekend. After our first competition, we will also be posting a bit less, however we are unsure of the current schedule with that. We will let you know as soon as we can. Thank you for sticking with us. Goodbye, and stay safe!
