It is officially the end of week 4 of build season, 3 weeks from our first competition of the season. We have continued to work on our Computer Aided Design, aka our CAD, which we use to create the plans for our robot, and have been developing many mechanism prototypes. In addition, our testbed robot is finished and ready to trial our components. We also started preparing for our upcoming outreach events at the MIT Hackathon and the Bowen Science Fair.

Our team likes to prototype in parallel, which means each group makes a prototype of a mechanism at the same time. This allows us to test as many ideas as possible in our short build time. These prototypes allow us to test our designs and modify them before we put them on the robot. We are currently prototyping a shooter, an intake, a hopper (which stores balls), and a climber. 

We have finished prototyping the shooter. At first, we started with a three-wheel shooter, but because of design difficulties, we settled on a hooded turreted shooter with two wheels. This makes the ball have a different path than the original shooter– instead of arc-ing upwards like a positive quadratic equation, it starts high and arcs downwards into the goal. Below is a photo of our prototype.

We’ve decided to integrate our intake with our climber, combining them into essentially one mechanism. Now, the question for them is whether we want to climb with one hook or two hooks, which we will resolve through more testing. This combo intake/climber mechanism is moved into CAD and now we are trying to make iteration one of all of the designs. Below is the CAD of the mechanism. 

Our strategy team has keeping it busy! One member is working on a growth analysis of all FIRST teams worldwide, tracking how they have been doing since their conception. Two other members have been working on a 3D plot showing OPR by DPR by CCWM, or a plot showing how offensively good each team is, how defensively good, and how many points they contribute on average to a match.  

Electrical has been busy training and practicing. They are mainly focusing on building a mock electrical board so they know what to do in a couple weeks, when we will have to wire the entire robot. 

We are using our testbed robot, Roadkill, to show rookies how robots are built and give them a chance to work on a completed robot. Later, it will be used to test mechanisms before they go on the final robot.

The field elements team has been busy making mock ups of pieces of the field, so that we have something for our drivers to train with once the robot is finished. It can take a long time to make these because they must be built to the exact same specifications as the real field elements in order to be useful in robot testing and mock games. Below is our model of the lazy-Susan spinner that will be on the field for robots to spin. 

The CAD team has nearly finished the complete design of our robot! Once that is done, we can move on to building the final mechanisms and attach them to our robot.

In the meantime, we have a team working on the chassis and framework on the robot. They have finished the main cutting the parts for the chassis and have now moved on to the finer, more complicated parts of the framework. Also, our coding team has been working on the basic framework for the code and have all the subsystems defined in the code.

Our Chairman’s team has been hard at work on our presentation about the team, which we will present to judges during competition. The award also requires an essay, for which we have been gathering data through a survey and interviews of team members. Below, Or-El and Coach Chuck discuss the presentation.

We are moving steadily through build season and a lot is going to happen in the near future! We hope that you will be with us the whole way! Be sure to check out our Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/ligerbots_frc2877/.