Home Alone.... 365?

Still trying to remind myself what this place looked like.

Well, I'm sure you know what they say about the best laid plans and all... We won't be going back to campus for a while longer. This has the most impact on the Skills Challenge team - but almost every CyberKnight was looking forward to getting some actual face-time with one another. We'll need to wait a little bit longer.

To that end, this week will be more of the same. I need to try capture a few more OnShape screenshots to share... Put something other than text in these posts!

10,000 Hours

There's some quote out there about it taking 10,000 hours to master a particular skill or tool. Unfortunately - most people see fewer than 100 hours of that masterful skill being used. Some other folks are getting into F1, but I've followed the sport for years. You see the drivers mastering their vehicles for a few hours on a weekend. You don't see the hours at the gym, in the factory, the nutrition, studying the data sheets. Yet this is where and how the success is built.

In FRC we see some teams perennially at the top, and others trying to break into elite status. We see the robots and the matches. We don't usually get a good glimpse into the 10,000 hours of build season. Probably the hardest part of writing a process blog is finding and distilling significant stories within the combined hours of a build season. 

Pictured: Race winner following 2 hours on a Sunday afternoon.
Not pictured: Hundreds of hours in the simulator, the gym, the conference room.
Also not pictured: 2000 engineers, designers, marketers, etc...

For CyberKnights (trying to break into meme status - er - elite status) the Saturday and Sunday after crafting out an accelerated schedule flew by. With it, a blank sheet went to a solid baseline geometry for our 2021 Skills Challenge optimized robot. To be fair - having built a blue banner robot in 2020 gave us a significant starting advantage - our plan was to re-use as much as possible, simplify as much as possible, and finish the CAD as early as possible. With 10,000 hours from last year, and the hours from this weekend, we were well on our way.

All The Things! Part 2

Our leadership and scheduling conversations led to a very important discovery - We have a lot of tasks to keep track of this year.

Regular season award submissions including Chairmans and Woodie Flowers are pretty well known to us at this point. Somewhat new is a more organized version of the robot awards and submitted documentation. Each of the challenges then have their own components to capture, document, and make presentable. Our students are also grouped slightly differently - having both sub-team groups, and challenge groups. As things stand, we are tracking 5 individual groups of tasks: Core engineering, core business, and the 3 challenge teams. Each has their own space in Slack, Discord, and Google Drive, and each has representation in our weekly leadership calls for status updates. So far this seems to be working well - but we haven't started nearing specific deadlines. The real test of our organizational skills is yet to come.

The Tipping Point

Back in week 1, the tiger team (Frosted Flakes!) I worked with was looking into the Interstellar Accuracy Challenge. Our baseline was looking back to what our 2020 robot could achieve. For this challenge, the time limit didn't seem daunting, but the full range of distances looked daunting. Our 2020 shooter design utilized a single, high mass flywheel and a very stiff fixed-hood shooter. With software tuning, we were able to shoot reasonably well from 10-20 feet. Interstellar Accuracy Challenge has us shooting closer than this, and would also test our accuracy at the furthest range. These were identified as points to iterate on for our 2021 machine.

Easiest method to get the near distance was simply the raise the shooter. Fast forward to our current week and our weekend CADathon - our 2021 V1 design had a shooter several inches higher than 2020. To summarize the next Monday meeting:

"It looks tall"

After Monday we took another look at our core goals - Did a tall shooter meet our requirements? Had we defined our requirements thoroughly enough? Not quite back to the drawing board, but we did take a quick detour to prepare some Crayola CAD and attempt to put some numbers to our concerns.

It does look tall...

Pros:

• Tall shooter should be able to accurately hit full range of distances more easily. - 2 challenges
• We have some master geometry sketches already in place.

Cons:

• High CG may impact speed and maneuverability. - 3 challenges
• Crayola CAD showed CG higher than our ideal target.
• We have last years complete master geometry with a short shooter.
• When we moved the shooter up, we reduced the contact time with the flywheel - untested difference from our known product.

While the inevitable changes started happening, a small group (hooray!) broke off into another meeting and completely remade the schedule given the schools new guidelines. We built some additional contingencies into our schedule as well - if we are unable to get into the lab in 55 days (from the time of this writing), we're all rage-quitting. (It's on the schedule.)

The robot after Monday's chat.
Simple is good, right?

Random Musing of the Week

Write things down.

I hopped into the Innovation Challenge team chat today - they had a really good system where literally (like, actually literally) every time anyone said anything on topic and of interest to the discussion, it was immediately followed up with "write that down!"

This is important because, at some point this week, or earlier, I had a few random musings - things about FRC, things CyberKnights do, (things we should do) - and yet I can't recall any of them at this point in time! :-D

So...

How about this for a quick one: Game Design challenge teams, food for thought. Focus on the core mechanics. Make the core game loop amazing. The coolest little detail or specific little item is meaningless if the core game is not enjoyable to play (or watch). Come up with lots of ideas. Pick your best few core game loops/concepts (depending on team size), and develop them all. Playtest your ideas frequently as you make changes. You'll probably find that you're either falling out of love with a concept, or trying to hard to force the concept to work - at which point its time to fall out of love with the concept.

"So at the endgame there's going to be this cat..."
"Is it a fun cat?"

Have fun!

-B