As the build season is ending we continue to work with subteams to finish everything up for our upcoming competition season. Everyone is super pumped, especially our rookie members who get to see it all for the first time! In celebration of the upcoming season, we made locker posters that are displayed to let the other kids at our school know who we are. Upcoming is our annual Open House, in which we celebrate with our parents, sponsors, and Lakeview administration all of the work we did during build season. It will be this coming Monday, February 18, from 6PM to 7PM. We can’t wait to see and show all of the amazing people involved with our team.
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Our CAD team tested many aspects of the claw on our Big Arm. They tested to make sure the claw fits inside the starting configuration of our robot, which is tucked inside the frame perimeter. The ROBOJACK was also put into the robot on CAD to make sure it fit inside. The Big Arm on our robot lacked support and started to bend, so more supports were created to prevent from any sort of bending or falling. Two robots are built every year, one practice robot to test mechanisms and to practice driving, and one to use directly for competing. Our Mechanics team worked on making a second claw and arm for our competition robot after it had been put on the practice bot. Motors were also wired to get the Big arm and claw moving, to test how well both of those mechanisms held up. Our Chairman’s team worked on the essay for the Chairman’s award, and voiced over our video. Chairman’s also prepared for our Sponsor Night presentation coming up on February 18th by having students practice presenting as well as edit slides in our presentation to express as much about our team as possible.
During the prototyping process, our mechanics team tested and decided against suction cups because while it lifted up hatch panels in a functionable way, it couldn’t pick up the cargo, so we went with a velcro design instead. This was designed by our CAD team. Since then, our mechanics team finished our electrical board and mounted it onto the chassis. They’re also making the claw to pick up the hatch panels and cargo for our big arm. Our CAD team assembled the RoboJack, which is a scissor lift used to lift up the robot on to Hab level 3. They also designed the claw in an effort to get the velcro piece working and connected to the big arm. Our Chairman’s team continued to work on the essay and make more progress to the video. They also worked on the presentation for our annual Sponsor Night, hosted on February 18th. Today was the beginning of build season . The race is on, time to plan and bring our ideas to life and begin prototyping. First we came up with the idea of suction cups to be able to pick up the cargo in Destination Deep Space then began prototyping with suction cups of various sizes,shapes,and materials. After a failed attempt to find a suction cup that would be able to grasp on to the cargo we are now putting our focus on a wheel intake system . We started the research process to be able to raise/lift our robot to hab level three (13in from the ramp or 1ft1in from level 2). The CAD/Programming team is beginning to digitally build drivetrains to determine whether we will use a 8-wheeled drive or a 6-wheeled drive system and determine what will be more beneficial for out robot in the game. Today, we celebrated the official 2019 kickoff event! After watching the live feed to find out what game we’d be playing for the year, we read through a couple sections of the game manual, and played a human game, where team members pretended to be the robots. For the Sandstorm period, each “robot” closed their eyes. For each match we had, the rules changed for different strategies to use. Overall, it was a very exciting day for our team! All of us are very pumped for build season and couldn’t do it without our very helpful mentors, sponsors, and coaches. All 4327 team members and FIRST volunteers got together to host the annual FTC Michigan State Championship event. We set-up and tore down the fields used for the. Some of our team members were referees, other members watched the safety glasses booths, and other members helped guide the teams to where they needed to go for judging. Overall, the event was great! We’d like to thank all of the FIRST volunteers who came and helped out at the event. We could not have run this event without your support. Today, we went to the FLL Jr. event that we hosted. Many teams came to showcase their projects that they created for Mission Moon. We spent a lot of the time there volunteering to help other FLL Jr. teams that came from all across Michigan. We also presented our T-Shirt cannon to the teams, and they were very excited to watch as we explained how the robot worked and how we created it! We would like to thank the very generous staff from Lakeview and our mentors for attending the event and all of our students in Q Branch! Before the event, to help prepare for the expo and other competitions, our younger teams received mentorship from a couple of members of Q Branch, Jimson Yang and Ben Heiss. They helped the teams from Westlake, Galaxy Builder 1 & Galaxy Builder 2. They were very helpful to the teams and spent a lot of time on after-school visits to the elementary school. Today we experienced a simulation of what a kickoff would be like! To do so, we got into five groups made up of people from randomly assorted sub-teams to create a robot design that would function in a previous competition. All of the teams came up with really interesting ideas about how their robot would work, like what drive it would use, its intake, type of elevator, defense mechanisms, and how it would climb. While the mock kickoff was a lot of fun, we can’t wait for the real game reveal! A huge thanks to our sponsors, mentors, and coaches for allowing us to be able to experience this. We went to the Zoo Boo again! This time, some of our tasks included watching over a booth that involved experimenting with what animals eat and to teach kids about the diet of animals. The other booth was an arts and crafts booth where we taught kids how to make a bat using a tube, string, construction paper, and tape. This was a very exciting time and a lot of fun to do! We hope to be able to do it again next year. As a team, today we volunteered at the Zoo Boo! Our tasks included pumpkin carving and manning the booths to pass out candy to kids. It was overall a very fun and exciting experience, and our team is going again on October 26th. The Zoo Boo is open to the community, so if any of our great sponsors, mentors, or supporters would like to attend, our team encourages and supports the Zoo! - |
