Day 29: Practice Schedule

We put together the intakes and started drilling holes for the electronics frame. We also started creating a practice schedule for the competition drive team to practice with our practice bot (right).

Day 26: Website Changes and More

We made some edits to our website homepage. We added the dates of our competitions. We also added a countdown clock counting down to the end of build season. Along with that, we added a picture slideshow of our platinum sponsors. We added the final electrical board to the practice bot to make sure it fit and how it looks. The mechanical team that stayed after school worked on attaching the spool to the practice bot. The programming team worked on programming the Xbox controllers for each driver.

Day 25: No More Soddering

The electrical team finished Soddering the limit switch wires and encoder wires. After shrinking heat shrink tuning in the wires at the panel connections and soddering sites, we attached them to Heimdall. We are still working on the elevator. We about finished the final electrical board.

Day 24: DRIIIVE!

We got Heimdall drving today (above) and picking up totes. We are programming it for driving over the ramp. Soddering finally finished today with the limit switches. We've made a practice bot (robot frame with Mecanum wheels for drive practice) and Heimdall, the protobot-soon-to-be-finalbot.

Day 23: Changing the Elevator Design

We drove in certain scenarios and tested current readings to better understand how proficient the motors were. We removed the hay squeezer and tried a different design for it to go lower to the ground. We started adding stoppers for the elevator.

Day 22: Tweaking

We added a stage to the motors for more power for lifting the elevator. We attempted to fix the hay squeezer design, and did many tests on the new elevator with currents to see the amount of energy and how we can fix the motors. We also worked on the final electrical board (right).

Day 21: Heimdall

We chose our robot name: Heimdall, who is the gatekeeper of Asgard. As you can see, we've now added the elevator design to the new Mecanum chassis.

Day 20: Continuation

Today the electrical team continued working on the final electrical. We thought of names for this year's final robot. We mounted I-Bolts for the elevator. We continued working on robot components.

Day 19: Finalizing Edits

The mechanical team mounted the spool to the first prototype. The second prototype frame was fitted with its transmission mounts. The electrical team started working on the final electrical board. The design team started working on the second version of the intake and the detachable hay squeezer design on Autodesk Inventor. 

Day 18: Switching Gears

Today we really went in hard on switching to Mecanum wheels and driving. We were able to, today, start strafing with our prototype using those wheels. The electrical team continued soldering encoder cables, and the design team continued working on fixing kinks in the Autodesk Inventor design of the robot.

Day 17: Cut Connection

We continued working on the connection between the drive chassis and the elevator. The electrical team worked on soddering encoder cables. The design team continued working on the elctrical board on Autodesk Inventor.

Day 16: Slide 'n' Ride

Today we worked from 10-4. The programming team worked on slide drive. Fish worked on welding the carriage for the elevator. We began attaching the elevator to the drive chassis.

Day 15: Intake

We drove our current prototype today for the first time, of course without the intake design. We added the intake motors to the prototype. The design team cleaned up the electrical room while the mechanical committee worked on the intake.

Day 14: Omni-Everything!

     We worked for 4 hours yesterday from 3-7. Our scoring platform feild pieces were completed. The gears ordered finally came in and were installed into the omni frame. The omni frame was given to electronics and the electronics board is installed. Our goal is to have the omni frame driving at the latest on Sunday, preferably as soon as Saturday. It's all up to programming now. The hay squeezer resizing has been finished. The design team finished designing our new intake and tomorrow we will CNC them out and install them onto the omni frame.

Day 13: Progressive

We redid the electrical board because the aluminum underneath the Talons was barely cutting into the space of one of the motors. We angle filed the aluminum to fit its dimensions and then put all of the electrical components back together. Also, the Buckingham Charter High School team came over today, and we helped them with encoded motors (see above).

Day 12: Work, Work, Work

We finished the prototype electrical board. There's room for improvement, but now programming can program using the new board for this year. We finished programming omni drive, and also finished resizing the elevator. We received our new slide. We finished designing the hay squeezer on Autodesk Inventor.

Day 11: Run-of-the-Mill

Today was busy as usual. We started working on the elctrical board and bolted the PDP, pneumatics control module and voltage regulator module. We still have yet to position the RoboRio, and the Talons are still in the working. We continued designing the layout of the electrical board on Autodesk Inventor.We started putting together some of the custom CNC transmission mounts. We reset one of the RoboRios.

Day 10: Still Trapped ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

It was a short work day from 3-5. Joey (our scout master) detailed what we want to scout for the game this year. We finished re-sizing our elevator to fit our Inventor model and we reattached the hay squeezer pickup onto the elevator. We started drilling holes into our omni frame, which was welded yesterday, in order to fit our custom transmissions. There is still a lot of design work to happen to work out the kinks in our design. We aim to have the omni chassis complete and driving by the end of Saturday. We continue to struggle with the implementation of the intake with our design.

Day 9: Plowing Forward

A week into build season. Already. We've got 5 more weeks to go.

We cut out the designated piece of Lexan for the electrical board and outlined where everything should go. We also finished welding a new chassis for the official prototype of our 2015 robot. This weekend went by quickly but we were able to accomplish a lot. The electrical committe finished tuning up the electronics panel on Beowulf. In order to simulate our slide drive, we assembeld a replica using the small VEX robots. The robot drives well and we decided to make a drive course out of the previous VEX game, VEX Skyrise to help train our drivers. On a smaller note our new robotics sweatshirts came in which means we can now look fashoinable while we cut our fingers up. We resized the elevator to fit our design, which caused us to have to resize our hay-squeeze arm mechanism. We are still in the prototyping phase, but as we discover more issues we are able to come closer to our final design. We started and finished cutting our omnidrive system, so we hope to have a working, driveable chassis within the next two days.

Day 8: Crackdown

We finished our hay squeezer design and tested it. It's pretty decent, and there's room for improvement. We received more CAN cable today, and used it to connect the RoboRio with all of the Jaguars, the pneumatics control module, and the radio module on Freyja. The RoboRio seems to work; we then updated the firmware for the Jaguars for it to work. Drive team consideration started today. We also signed up for The Grid: an AI (artificial intelligence) website builder that literally builds itself. We plan to start building it after this season finishes. We continued designing the robot chassis. We also built a VEX robot with omniwheels, and tested them. T-shirts got designed for this year. We also started an initial design of the electrical board.
We had a little incident with the batteries. At around noon, we came across two completely dead batteries that couldn't be charged any more. We set them outside the door of the electrical room. An hour or two later, some of us smelled somehting like rotten eggs in the room while we were bolting Jaguars to Beowulf and working on the Chairbot electrical board during the RoboRio testing. It became increasingly stronger, and we realized that another battery, Maxwell (we name all of our batteries according to scientist names), was swelling up. We aired out the room and within 30 minutes the smell was gone. Back to testing and diagnosing.

Day 7: Squeezing Hay

In electrical, we cleaned up Beowulf, our 2013 robot, of some of its electrical components. In programming, we continued debugging the RoboRio. In design, we continued working on the chassis and modified elevator. And in mechanical, we worked on the Hay Squeezer.

Day 6: Welcome to Class!

We tested out the elevator design on Fergie's chassis, our 2nd robot from last season. As the video above shows, it didn't work so well. Now we are going to switch to long stance, making the elevator not as wide as the robot chassis. For programming, scouting brainstorming is under way. We're doing some modifications to the program for this year that will greatly improve the efficiency of the program. RoboRio testing is still under way.

Day 5: Breakpoint

Today, we finished our elevator mechanism prototype and, after connecting an old electrical board to Fergie, made it work. Currently, with the winch, it is slow, but we are trying to improve that without causing too much havoc. We continued testing the RoboRio on Freyja after we finished wiring the new control modules. We also continued design the base chassis of our robot for this year. We are going to redo our forced decision matrix for possible robot designs, and this time with more thought. and scrutiny.

Day 4: Vexing Vectors

At the beginning of class our teacher, Mr. Green, gave a debrief of what our designs were and announced that tomorrow we will be voting on specific designs and rank their importance on a matrix chart to finalize our role in the game. After class, half of us stayed to continue working on the elevator which is structurally complete, a winch of some sort still needs to be added to lift it. Our electronics committee finished wiring up the competition robot from last year, Freyja, with this year's new components.

Contemplating over the elevator design, with 2013's Beowulf looking on.

Day 3: Imbroglio

Today after a weekend of hard working we discussed in class what had happened. After review our class seperated and continued to prototype the different design ideas. One of the prototypes that we are mainly focusing on is an elevator system. After some research we came across a YouTube video demonstrated by FRC team 973, the Greybots, that demostrated how to put together an elevator system. While some students were working on prototypes, there was a very passionate discussion on strategy and our role in the game between the mentors and students.

Design team working on the elevator, omniwheels, and basic prototype frame.

Day 2: We're Getting Somewhere...

Our day began at nine and we began to prototype many designs that came to mind during our brainstorming phase. Initially we thought about building a system such as a haybale stacker in which we pick up from the front and load the totes onto the back of our robot. We built a pick-up mehcanism that one of the three day robots had come up with. Our electrical commitee finished taking off all the elctronics from our 2014 robot, Freyja, and finsihed installing the new electronics for practice to see how everything fits. The programmers started to download the new software and the veterans were teaching the rookies. Our rookie team, Buckingham, came to our school and we spend time with them explaining the rules of the game and helping them decide their role in the game.

Preparing Freyja, our first 2014 robot, to be tested with the RoboRio and other new modules

Day 1: Kickoff!!

At promptly 7:10 a.m., we raffled off the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 for which we have been selling raffle tickets for the past three months. We raised a total of $3,429. The winner is Diana Phillips!!
Many parents and mentors showed up at kickoff, including many Class of '14 alumni from the team. Around 20 alumni showed up, and nearly all of the people that graduated last year returned for kickoff.

When Recycle Rush, this year's FRC challenge, hit us with totes and litter, we were ready for it and split into our discussion groups. Each group took a section of the new game manual and studied every bit of it. We then came back together as a team and discussed it respectively. After that, having learned how the game worked, we started strategizing in our groups.
From there we split into our committees and worked. The mechanical committee worked on a design that we think may be a strong surefire idea, and began prototyping it. The electrical committee worked on gutting out Freyja, our first 2014 robot, so that we can test the RoboRio on that robot. The design committee designed field elements for the challenge. The programming committee discussed about what autonomous strategy they would program.