The Test

Starting to fit and form bumpers.

This week was finals week for the CyberKnights, so school took precedence for most of the evenings. We shortened Monday, cancelled Tuesday, and added an optional Friday. Most mentors used the free time to kick back and relax. Or, catch up on work. At least that's what I did.

Pretty much says it all....

Yep, that about sums things up. As we head into week 4, we need to re-tune the energy and effort, and impart a sense of urgency to the students. (Or we can build an EveryBot and just drive practice for the next 4 weeks. ... I wonder how that would work...)

Engineering Sync

I said earlier that Kick-off weekend are the two most important days in a build season. If that's true, then perhaps the full-engineering team sync is the second or third most important day. (Bag day used to be pretty important. It'll be fun in a few short years when mentors need to start explaining what "bag day" was. Kinda like "crate day". Kids these days...)

At the end of week 2, our different teams had created V1 and V2 prototypes, tested, found faults, made improvements, and documented lessons learned, and design process. We collected the engineering team leads and mentors, and any other interested students, and had our robot sync meeting. The end goal for this meeting was to have a complete picture of our robot 1, and ensure all sub-teams knew and understood the integration points. Our software team gathered notes on expected sub system behaviors, motors, and sensors. Our student lead collected notes on total motor counts, pneumatic counts, BOM and weight estimates. This single meeting, a few hours long (mostly due to tangents and "Bobby jokes") allowed all the teams to get a detailed picture of where and how their pieces fit into the robot as a whole.

Our shooter designer is not only killing the design - he's got some amazing art skills.

Overall, this was a very detailed technical talk - a lot of suggestions from many people in the room on mounting, sharing, gains and drawbacks, and stuff we can steal from past games/robots. We talked through each system, starting at the bottom up (Chassis, Collector, Indexer, Shooter, Wheel of Fortune, and Climber). Each system described their lessons from prototypes, and drew a picture of the current "final" that would go on the robot. They talked about:

• how the component mounts
• how is it powered
• what control is needed (continuous rotation, limited rotation, what the limits are, etc)
• what sensors they expect to use for the given control
• (we actually missed this one - but a next step could be - how the operator uses the software controls and button mapping)

Also, we spent a lot of time talking LimeLight. Last year this was a "thrown on" item, and the view was obstructed quite badly. This year, the LimeLight requires a higher priority to meet some of our robot goals, so hopefully talking about it earlier will help get it better located.

Next Steps

With all the systems covered, we have a game plan for the next steps. CAD-ing, CAM-ing, and starting cutting. For our first time designers, this can represent a decent challenge - they've crafted a prototype that effectively floats in space. How will they actually mount their component? How do they ensure it fits within the envelope and weight restrictions given. How do they make it black?

Rollin' rollin' rollin'....
CyberKnight quality tensioners. Good enough for the prototype!

Also, how are they going to cope with changes that happen after our system discussion? Our indexer had an open question - an unknown unknown to solve - and would return after a set time with knowledge gained. The knowledge gained a few days later was - we have to change things. The indexer has altered the robot. Pray it does not alter it further.

(Spoiler... hah, I don't even need to say it at this point, you all know what's going to happen.)

Inspiration

I live my life 1/4 robot at a time. For those 10 weeks or less... I'm free. (Wait, does that even make sense..?)

If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough. (Okay - that works. Real quote from a real person.)

-B