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Week two has ended and week three is underway with much progress. CAD team is almost complete with full CADed Robot, Mechanics is beginning to starting to piece together parts of the robot, programming is prepping autonomous and teleop, and Chairman’s is close to being completed with the essay. The Red Rolling Cart of all of our supplies was well organized today.
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Another building week has begun! The prototypes are close to being finished and the real deal of building the final robot is close approaching. The CAD Team is relentlessly working on 3-D modeling the drivetrain, intake, shooter, conveyor, wheel spinner, elevator, and the skywalker for the first draft of the final robot. The Mechanics team is excited to install our New Falcon 500 motors into the gearboxes, Controls begin to layout the autonomous modes, and Chairmans is documenting all prototypes and the Chairmans Essay.
The first week of build season is almost complete. Throughout the week, the team has been hard at work on their prototypes for the future robot. The prototypes are being tested on the wonderfully built remakes of the trench wheel and the power port. The trench wheel and power port are being built by our gracious mentors, wonderful parents, and our fantastic coach. The days have been filled with lots of failures, success, tweaks and relentlessness.
Today we are on day two of prototyping different types of intake systems. Our team split up into 5 groups to make prototype visuals of what our robot could look like in the future. We had an intake group, conveyor belt group, wheel spinner group, climber group, and elevation group. Today also consisted of Chairman’s organizing files to prepare for writing our essay and begin filming the video portion.
Today was our annual celebration of kick-off! After reading the game manual, we got into our sub-teams and made QFD (Quality Function Deployment) charts worth of prototypes to put all of our ideas for what would make a great robot for this competition season. With our new sponsorship from Bowers Aluminum Anodizing, we will now have a robot that will really pop out from the stands. We would like to thank our parents, sponsors, and mentors for helping us make 2020 a great start to the season.
 Today was the second Skills Camp of the season. Recommended by our Safety Captain, Kevin Grady, 10 members, and 2 mentors spent the first half of the morning exploring and learning the ways of CPR. While they were becoming certified, the rest of the team was organizing and preparing for the build season. As the mechanics broke down the 2019 competition robot and organized all the small parts and equipment, we began testing a potential intake wheel makes the whole team (including Coach Burdette) ready for competition season.
Today at Lakeview High School, we were proud to host the FLL Jr. Expo. 80 elementary schoolers woke up bright and early to set up their presentations in the hallways of Lakeview, for everyone to see. There were different rotations for the kids to go to. Different teams from all over Michigan arrived at each station ready to be apart of the amazing experiences ahead. One of the stations showed off the 2019 FRC competition robot and the 2019 FTC competition robot who up until now was named the Nindroids, as of this year it is now named Q2. Q2 is named for being the 2nd branch of Q Branch. After watching the two robots in awe, they moved on to building or drawing. The kids were given gumdrops and toothpicks to build whatever structure they wanted. One of the adults decided to join in and see if his structure could hold a large bottle of hand sanitizer, (it worked!). The kids created some amazing structures and were very proud of themselves! The kids also got to color a beautiful poster, showing off their creativity and their journey of discovery. The attending teams were greeted by our guest author, Simon Thalmann, and the Bruin Bear both of who are from Kellogg Community College at one of the stations. The Bruin Bear was moved and played by our Chairman’s captain, Alayna Robinson. They also got to see Heavy Metal 2.0 shoot shirts. The turnout was fantastic and lots of kids had a great time!
Today was the first Skills Camp of the season. We are preparing for the upcoming season by introducing the incoming members to each of the subteams. All members are getting to work hands-on to make a positive impact for the upcoming season. As well as getting the newcomers ready to be a part of the season, but we are also sparking their interests for STEM and showing them a whole world of opportunities to pursue it as a career. This year we have 10 newcomers, that makes up about a third of the team, with all of these new members makes up the relentless group of people who come from different backgrounds After today, every member will be divided into a subteam for the year. The different sub-teams will make their own significant advances in creating this season’s robot. The rookie members are finding their individual jobs in their subteam, their captains are guiding them to find a new perspective on STEM. It’s our second district event and it’s already been kicked off to a great start! Our CAD/Programming captain received a gift bag, that contained a Barbie Engineering Doll he gave away to a young student on an elementary FIRST team. At this event we won the imagery Award- an award that “celebrates attractiveness in engineering and outstanding visual aesthetic integration of machine and team appearance.” All Q Branch students were super cheerful and proud to win this award. It was a very big honor and excited all of us! Because it was Jackson’s rookie event, and we have experience hosting, we helped them out with coordination. Our team stayed and helped tear-down their event for an hour, where we decided to have a bit of fun while working-we made a giant tape ball that was collected up from the tape used on the field. We can’t wait to compete at the East Kentwood district event next week. A huge thanks to our parents who made plywood numbers to cheer on smaller/rookie teams attending this event. We can’t wait to compete! We plan on bringing our team goose to this event, too! It’s going to be a lot of fun. Today, at the Lakeview District event that we also hosted, we competed and overall had a great time! It was very exciting to see our pink robot out on the field. Part of the opening ceremonies included a video provided by state senator Debbie Stabenow, where she said our mantra: This is How We Robot! Over our build season we started and mentored team 7811, the St. Phil Tigers who won the Rookie All Star Award. It was great to see how much their team has grown during all of our build season. They’ve grown so much over this period of time and we’re all very stoked for them! We won the Gracious Professionalism award! It’s an award that recognizes teams demonstrating the core values of FIRST. All of our members were very proud and felt so honored to be able to win it. We’re so happy and excited for our next event and can’t wait to compete, at the Jackson District Event in two weeks! In addition, meet Frederick. For the first time ever, we have a mascot! Introduced to us by our team captain, Dominik Kerschbaum, we now have an official goose that will lead us in the stands. Our goal for him is to have as many signatures on one of our team shirts as possible. Frederick will continue coming with us to events. |
