Puzzling Over the Pieces

I miss this place...
(It doesn't even look like this anymore...)

While reminiscing on previous build seasons, I've come to the conclusion that our lab leaks energy into people who spend time there. And now that we're away from the lab - we've been tired!

On the fortunate side, King's Schools - home of the CyberKnights - has made it possible for school teams to begin practicing in safe ways, and that includes robotics! While we have nothing planned, our current expectation is that groups of 5 (combined students and mentors) will be able to utilize the lab and resources for prototyping, manufacturing and building.

Do All the Things!

Week 2 had us continue a lot of brainstorming, but also got everyone on the team involved in each of the three available projects. (For those keeping track at home, the 3 projects are Infinite Recharge at Home Skills Challenge, Game Design Challenge, and Global Innovation Challenge sponsored by Qualcomm.) Monday and Thursday meetings started out with tiger teams (more tiger team time!) brainstorming initial concepts and available opportunities for the game design challenge and innovation challenge.

The new virtual whiteboard for 2021.
On the plus side - self-documenting!

Midway through our scheduled Thursday meeting, we had student and mentor "challenge team" selections, and broke out into the respective groups. (I'm going to use so many synonyms for group this year!) Once again, online tools are incredible. We've got our wiki for long-term documents, we got a Google drive for brainstorming notes and more, and we've got Slack for messaging, and Discord for meetings. With a few new channels created, and some online folders added - we all started digging in. Thursday's goal was for each roster to assign their respective leads (Champions!), and have a rough schedule with the known deliverables.

I hung out with the Skills Challenges team - while we recognized that we had longer than six weeks, we established a rather fast-paced schedule - trying to provide ample time at the end of the season for tuning and optimizing each challenge.

Side-bar: If I could go back in time, I would change the way we held this particular meeting. The whole group of students and mentors did not need to be present for setting the timeline and schedule. Two or three folks could (and should!) have broken off to build the schedule while the rest of the team focused on the goals and targets for these challenges, and maybe started getting into the robot requirements and specific metrics. (Just like... a normal build season? Crazy!) I feel like at least once a year - we dun goofed. Its alright though. The next day we realized that the schedule was aggressive, and got a few folks together to start our new master geometry sketches.

Challenge Accepted!

The other factions (more synonyms!) did roughly the same, but with smaller teams. Their seasons will be a little different, as their challenges are a little more free-form. 

Fun fact: I heard one student say they joined game design group because it seemed the most fun and the least work - I don't blame them for wanting that! - but they came out of their meeting with their mind blown. Each of these challenges is a LOT of work. Chances are I'll repeat that again before this season is over...

Random Musing of the Week

Oh man, I (intentionally or not..?) didn't mention everything that happened this summer and fall! Where to even begin!

Wife and I stayed busy over the summer with house projects...

Recruiting was rough. Some years when we're on campus and everything is normal recruiting can be a little rough. But this year especially - 

"Come join robots we do stuff!"

"What stuff?"

"sit on a Discord in total silence!" *

"..."

"Twice a week!"

* This may be exaggerated, but the silent moments feel so long....

We got a few good kids out of it - at the time I felt sorry that this was their exposure to FRC - thinking about it now, I still do, but at least they are getting a lot of the process, if not the hands-on experience.

CyberKnights entry for ChezyCAD 2020

We competed in ChezyCAD 2020 this Fall - and were recognized by the judges with the first place award! (We shared some stuff on Chief Delphi.) A number of our veteran (and one rookie!) designers took a long but fun weekend building a new-to-us style climber, based around our 2020 chassis and design style. This was a great experience, and the students were all abuzz after - looking for more opportunities and talking about improvements they would do for next time. If I was a dad, I'd be a proud dad! (I call them my kids all the time anyway...) ChezyCAD was a good application for our summer CAD practice. (And again - online tools were incredible! OnShape readily allowed students to work on their own, in groups, and review with mentors!) This year we started with a number of exercises for building out gearboxes (computing gearing, finding COTS parts, and identifying packaging trade-offs), and moved onto chassis design projects. If I had a magic wand - next year we would cut and assemble one of these projects - but that wasn't going to happen this year. Boo. :-(

For now, I'm just hoping I can write next weeks blog on time...

-B