A Whole New World

This world had all of it's viruses eradicated...

It's going to be a strange year.

I feel like everyone is saying that. I also read it on the internet, which means it must be true.

Welcome to 2021, and the unofficial 4911 CyberKnights build season blog (from the view of a mentor who is still wearing pajamas). This will be a little different than years past, given the COVID-19 pandemic and changes in society, but the goal of these posts were to tell our story and provide a look into our process, so hopefully some things will be the same.

Kickoff 2021 - Infinite Replay - er Recharge

Going to be a common view at meetings this year...

A rather low-key morning, the team watched the kick-off stream remotely. We had our Discord channel open for folks to join and "watch together". Naturally this meant a few folks groggily saying 'good morning', then absolute silence as the stream began. (In my defense, I was still on my first cup of coffee..)

Personally, I like that FIRST provided a number of different opportunities. As stated on the stream, (regarding game design specifically, but nicely describes this season as a whole,) teams are going to have different resources and availabilities this year. CyberKnights don't yet know if or when we will be able to get into our shop on campus. I've read/heard other stories of teams in better and worse positions... However, FIRST has provided different challenges that teams can complete entirely remotely, in person, or anywhere in between. I am weary of the effort required to create a "world class" submission for all of the challenges, but other teams mileage may vary.

Into the Unknown

I hope we're not the only team feeling like this...

Leadership team met briefly after the kick-off, before the all-team meeting. This year with the fluid situation, we hadn't talked about setting team goals, so we took a quick look at where and how we could set our targets with the latest information. Goals this year will likely be fluid as well...

From a leadership mentality, this year will also require a slight mindset shift. No longer is there a single unified purpose (do the thing with the thing - or, build a robot, or something). Instead, we'll have to manage multiple different projects, with their own specific tasks and timelines. Less single-product start-up, and more multinational conglomerate if you will. (In the "real world" as Lead on a team of 7, I actually have 2-3 projects in flight at any given time. Learning to be organized and learning to juggle, are very useful skills.)

Once we reconvened as a full team, some significant portion of the "usual process" started rearing its head once more - analyze the 3 project options, talk about what's required for them, some of the challenges to complete them, outcomes and potential goals our team could achieve if we attempt them. For the at home skills challenges, we broke into small groups (tiger team time!) and analyzed each challenge on its own - specifically looking at tasks that can be completed remotely, and prioritizing robot requirements for each challenge.

A lot of focus during Build Season surrounds the robot - this year could be a nice refresher for many teams (or sub-groups within teams). I was happy to see that - while we have a challenge of not currently being able to access our shop - our teachers and students are working together to build a "Return to Campus" proposal. (It's like giving ourselves a 4th project!) Proposals, sponsorships, fundraising, all these types of writing are super important for any business or product venture. In this case it was great to see students doing research - looking into health regulations, school policies, and more - and writing out a draft to help us safely gain access to our equipment (in small groups, with masks, and cleaning tools and everything else...).

Random Musing of the Week

Documentation is important. Even in my "real world" work, (software engineer,) documentation is a requirement of all my teams projects. Bad documentation leads to increased time to complete a project. Good documentation leads to fewer bugs and faster knowledge transfer for new team members.

FIRST is no different, and while teams have different experiences, ages, tools, etc, every team builds a robot. Every robot has good and bad parts. Every robot will have a story, a reason, of why decisions were made, why parts were chosen, and more. Most years, we have some amount of documentation and specific choices. These have been notes left in CAD, items written in a notebook, lots of drawings on whiteboards, but at the end of the year, proper collection and preservation was deprioritized, and never completed. Last year, we attached a wiki-app to our Slack (Heroku platform to host wiki.js package) and attempted better documentation practices. From that, we had a design page for the 2020 robot including notes, tuning and testing, prototyping information, and more.

This year's robot name might not be finalized...
We also haven't fully backfilled simple descriptions on the older robots...

My advice - document small pieces regularly, and don't stop documenting simply because you missed a day, an update, or iteration. Some documentation is better than no documentation, and any documentation will be helpful for that season and beyond!

This year - given the challenges are based off last years robot, we have not only last years robot, but the information on how we created it and some information on why we chose certain mechanisms, solutions, or even updates we intended to make (but didn't/couldn't when the world froze...).

I actually used some of my blog posts from 2019 and 2020 as documentation on the process. :-)

Do the thing. Document the thing. (Better - document the thing while you do the thing!)

Keep yourselves safe,

-B