Summer is here! We're finally, hopefully, all rested and recovered from the past season of build and competition. With our inspiration set and goals written, our summer training is in full swing. Our new team leadership has been meeting about the direction of the team, recruiting new members, and driving our summer events. Secretly, mentors have also been having a great time, meeting up with other PNW mentors at a potluck hosted by FIRSTWA, and keeping up with our alum and their internships, college graduations and jobs (don't tell the kids though, they aren't supposed to know that old people do fun things).
While we've had several meetings about summer events, capacity planning, team goals and improvement, the truth is, they are always constantly shifting. We may schedule specific tasks on the calendar, but each week we play it by ear given student progress, last minute planning, and mentor availability. At the core, following an incredible Einstein run that is still fresh in our minds, our focus is improving our engineering talent, with a goal of returning to Einstein as soon as possible. But part of training is teaching and encouraging others, so we won't simply be huddled up in our lab, CAD-ing, soldering, and Java-ing until our fingers turn numb and we inevitably 3-D print new hands - CyberKnights still have big plans to share our love of FIRST and STEM with our community, and the world!
Recruiting
Every team needs new members to sustain and grow, and the CyberKnights are no different. The CyberKnights recruit aggresively within both our high school and middle school. We have several existing channels to identify CyberKnight talent directly from STEM and engineering pools. We find these students through our FIRST pipeline, recruiting students who participate in the FTC class, and recruiting students who take the CAD, Computer Science, and Engineering classes. But this isn't the only way to create a sustainable team - we strive to make our team available to every student in the school. Both the high school and middle school have weekly all-student gatherings for announcements; we have used these sessions to demonstrate our robots, awards, and outreach programs, informing the student body on every aspect of our team.
What makes a CyberKnight a CyberKnight? We have an application process, and just like any job, a set of criteria we seek out in all new members. (Fortunately, someone has written the following on a whiteboard so I don't have to make it up as I go.)
Applicants:
* Willingness to learn
* Commitment
* Curiosity
* Common Sense
* Draws the robot on our application (Seriously, the first page is a big block of text, but its important text. So halfway through, theres one little sentence that says "take a break, flip this page over and draw a picture of a robot". On every application we now know who read the entire page of information or not. This also provides a healthy showing in the continuous debate of pencil versus ink, and red vs blue vs black ink. Obviously blue ink is still the overall winner. Ok I made that up, I have no idea what implements were used for drawing the robots... )
If thats what we expect to see in our applicants, what do we then expect to see from our full fledged CyberKnights? Glad you asked (or didn't)! Because that same someone also wrote this on the whiteboard:
CyberKnights:
* Proactive (thinking ahead)
* Competent
* Humble (willing to ask for help)
* Take constructive feedback
* Visionary
* Atention to detail
* Applied their ideas
* Honest
* Speaks Up
* Takes Ownership (shows pride in work)
* Effective time and priority management
* Dependable
To see if you have the attention to detail required of a CyberKnight, see if you can find the mis-spelled word above. If you found it/them, congratulations! Take a break, flip your computer/phone over, and draw a picture of a robot on it.
Lastly, in big bold (ish) letters is written:
Not Afraid of Failure
One of coach's favorite acronyms is FAIL: First Attempt In Learning. It is probably the core principle of the CyberKnights: everything we do gives experience, helps us gain understanding, and nothing holds us back.
With all that said and done, time to continue making up the rest of this as I go. Thanks again hidden whiteboard writing hero!
Outreach
As stated earlier, we love FIRST, STEM, and robotics, and we love sharing it with our community. We love that there are other teams in our area who have the same passion, and with whom we can work together to spread this message.
We were honored to be invited to the Edmonds 4th of July parade alongside 2910, and had a great day in the sun, showing off our 2016 robot Merlin alongside Jack-In-The-Bot's 2018 Carver Champion robot, Kayla. Why did we select our 2016 robot? Well, 2016 was a beast of a game and we built a robust bot to handle the punishment, which still functions well to this day. It has nothing at all to do with not having a laptop with the correct version of driver station to handle our 2014 robot. Definitely nothing to do with our 2015 robot having had all of its motor controllers removed. We have no idea why our 2017 bot isn't driving anymore, but everyone on the team agrees that software touched it last. And we have a real reason in that our 2018 robot is being used for driver training and off-season events, so we didn't want to put any more strain and punishment on it (or swap out wheels to drive on the road, or scratch the paint, or ... )
Unified Robotics has been a simply incredible program, and I personally am proud to continue to be a part of it. Unified Robotics is a program we started in 2015 bringing an exciting robotics experience to students with special needs through 1-on-1 partnerships. (If you have never heard of UR, I encourage you to check out www.unifiedrobotics.org!) In 2016, through our connections with Special Olympics Washington, we found out that we may have the opportunity to demonstrate Unified Robotics in the 2018 Special Olympics USA Games, hosted here in Seattle. Needless to say, we were ecstatic. Naturally, as we arrived closer and closer to the date, plans changed, things shifted, and some e-mails got eaten by the dog, but we executed at our CyberKnights level and put on a great show. We ended up having a single 30 minute demo on one of the main stages at the fan zone, but we attracted an enthralled crowd, received numerous compliments, and again, had an overall amazing time. Allow me personally to say thank you to Special Olympics, all the major sponsors of the USA Games, and again our amazing PNW FRC partner teams who helped put this demo together.
Every summer we have had a barbecue, inviting local teams to join us at the lab, play games out on the field, and enjoy delicious food prepared by our master chef mentors. This year was no different, and it's always fun getting together with friends outside of build and competition season, when we've all had some semblance of sleep.
Engineering Training
Summer is here, students are all grown up (ish), some have graduated, others are thinking on their new status as seniors. Thursday nights have once again turned into gathering nights. Our returning students, with several mentors and alum are hard at work practicing the skills necessary to be successful in the coming year. This year we have devised training schedules for our drive team, design team, electrical team, and software team. Throughout training we will have meetings covering business topics, outreach, new student orientation, and fun! Yeah, the meeting about fun is not fun in and of itself, but the fun that we have following the meeting on fun is usually quite fun. But first things first, Shinies!
New Toys
"It comes in lots of little small boxes" - Dan
"That's gonna be a lot of fun!" - Bob
Yep, it's like Christmas here in the CyberKnight shop! Not like, black anodized aluminum Christmas, but it is like new tool Christmas! This month we were fortunate to have delivered a new CNC lathe, CNC enclosed mill with automatic tool changer, and a CNC knee mill. We are hoping these machines help us teach and train new students and improve our in-season manufacturing, allowing us to iterate faster and manufacture more high fidelity prototypes. Also, they are very shiny. (Let's see how long that lasts...)
Software & Electrical
As I am working with the Mechanical and Design teams for the summer, I don't have too many detailed notes about the software and electrical training. I can tell you that both teams have recruited new members and are working hard, bringing everyone up to speed, and increasing our overall knowledge of each respective area. Our software team is investigating the use of Cheesy Drive to provide a more plug-and-play experience for our tele-operated code, and improve our capabilites in autonomous for the coming season. Electrical is hard at work preparing the new students with lessons in battery management, sensors and signals, and practical experience with robot wiring by stripping down and re-furbishing our 2018 practice bot.
Here is a wonderful picture of one of our returning software students, and a mentor diligently eating popcorn.
And here is another software student who clearly needs to take more physics classes to understand that despite his quickness, he is in fact slower than light waves and electrons in a crappy cell phone digital camera.
Mechanical/Design
To up our design chops, our lead engineering student split our group of students into "chassis" group, and team "pivot arm". He then gathered games from years past, and assigned each student to create a chassis or pivot arm that meets the regulations for the game. First step for each student was to read through the rules, and work with each other and mentors to define meaningful, reasonable strategic requirements, and transform this initial ask into specification documents. Once each spec doc was created and signed off, they all got hard to work planning and designing their respective systems.
Our new recruits have a different task to get them started: they will design and build our new bot cart. This is a great exercise to get our younger students learning the design process, from conceptualization, performing whiteboard CAD reviews, BOM and parts ordering, and finally, fabrication and assembly. The whole team is helping, providing feedback, reviewing ideas, and bonding with our newest CyberKnights.
I was a little unsure of what my specific role was going to be during this engineering training. We have 3 (now 4!) fantastic mechanical engineering mentors who understand tricky topics such as torque, moments, gearing, material strength, and the appropriate word choice when SolidWorks crashes. My role has generally involved ensuring the students are thinking about manufacturing/assembly/robustness/pit maintenance/field operation/integration with other systems/electrical requirements/software requirements/prettiness/anodized-ness. For this summer training, I am actually doing similar, but I've found personal pleasure in some of the interactions and conversations I've had with the students and other mentors. Firstly, all the mentors get super giddy when new parts arrive. It's fantastic to watch. I really do apologize that I don't have video from the first day when the shinies arrived. Secondly, the students are all super eager to show up, even during the summer months. They are upbeat, excited to spend time with each other and the mentors, and, as CyberKnights, are not afraid to ask for help. (Sometimes screaming at the top of their lungs whilst running around like headless chickens with arms flailing about and a combination of tears and sweat pouring down their faces until we eventually capture them in giant nets and pour pure Mountain Dew into their mouths to calm them down. And then we answer their question.) Some of the conversations I've had with students have been nostalgic returns to memory lane, describing in detail the excellence and abhorrence of some of our previous designs. Others involve talking about previous years, describing other teams robots, mechanisms, and game strategies, and our thoughts on their decision processes. I've really enjoyed the blue-sky thought conversations, watching the gears turning, the light bulbs flickering, and the look of understanding come across their eyes. It's not a bad way to spend a summer, and have some fun in the sun. :-)
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