Hello all! Welcome back to another Wire Clippers blog post, I hope you all have had a wonderful week thus far. We have some great news to share today about our progress. As mentioned previously, we have been working double-time to make sure we get done in time for the competition; that increased work speed has been very giving, and as such we’ve made amazing progress in a short period of time. I would also like to make a quick amendment from Monday’s post. I mentioned that there would be no post this upcoming Monday, Feb 20th, as it was President’s Day. I was misinformed, and in fact we will be in session that day (meaning there will also be a blog post for that day). My sincerest apologies for the mix up.
The Build Team: Now at the end of the week, the Build Team hopes to be able to ship off the robot to the programmers ASAP. To that end, they are particularly working on finishing up the arm and clamp mechanisms, and attaching them. As featured above, we are very happy with how the bot is looking thus far. We are close to being done, and after working with the programmers, we believe that there should be the perfect amount of time to finish the robot and code its movement and arm functions. In addition to general construction, the Build Team is also focusing on wiring the robot today. A strong aspect of our original design was that we pre-planned where our wires and electrical systems would go, and so far it is proving to be very useful to us.
The Programming Team: The Programming Team has been incredibly effective in working with little time and little resources. Despite not having full access to the robot, they have already set up much of the drive code needed to operate the robot. The arm code, however, is much more “prototype-ish,” as it is almost completely new code that they had to write for this bot specifically, instead of being able to repurpose old code like they did with the drive code. While some members were writing the fresh code, other members were deleting older code that we had in our repository. We realized that we had a lot of outdated code that was irrelevant, so some of our members took it upon themselves to archive it and then delete it, so we could keep space free for future code.
The Business Team: Today, the Business Team is hard at work, albeit a bit understaffed. Originally, our plan was to work on the FIRST Impact video, which is required to be given to the judges at our first competition. This is the second half of the FIRST Impact Award, the other half of which we just submitted this week. While our video is coming along smoothly, production was halted today due to a lack of hands to work on it. Instead, the business team got right to work organizing some of the nitty-gritty details of our team’s financial work. With the various purchases and donations that have gone through recently, it was important for the Business Team to stay up to date on exactly what was going on. The Business Team also worked on arranging some future purchases, such as team shirts and stickers. With our first competition being only two weeks away, it is imperative that we nail these aspects down ASAP.
Well, that’s about it for news this week. We appreciate you tuning in once again, and would like to wish you a restful and happy weekend. Goodbye, and stay safe!
