Obligatory Week 6 Post

You don't see this anymore...

This would be bag-and-tag week in an old, normal season.

Our major highlight of the week was the start of the full robot review. The burndown list was finished. Students took time to re-evaluate their systems, think about how to present, what questions to expect, and more. On Thursday, the whole engineering team took a top-down dive into our 2021 planned creation.

Final Review

Our entire Thursday meeting was spent reviewing our "final" CAD for the 2021 optimized skills challenge robot. I suppose the entire Monday was spent playing rock-paper-scissors to determine who presented on what. This year we had 3 main students running the CAD, due to the multiple challenges and different students trying new things. These students divvied up talking about the chassis and intake, the indexer, and the shooter and gearboxes respectively.

Tiny robot, won't take long to cover at all

During the review, many questions were asked -

• some make sure the basics were covered
• some to get further clarification
• some questions about specifics of the design, construction, material, strength, integration, and more

 

We asked a lot of questions, but with our documentation we had a lot of already provided answers. We also found and added a few more items to another burndown list. Some items on the robot are still unknown, so we attempted to add some flexibility to certain components.

Simultaneously a lot and a little inside this bot.

Thursday's meeting flew by - we ended up covering only the chassis, intake, and some of the indexer. The rest would wait until Saturday.

Random Musing of the Week:

So, NASA did a thing.

There are so many amazing things about the constant progress of technology, and at the same time it's amazing to see the human element and excitement. I suppose FRC could be considered a feeder into NASA - we build robots, they have to be on the field at a given time, and (over the season) over the years, hopefully the team continues to learn and progress, building better robots with the materials available.

I hope we've all seen the old tapes, the cars gathered down in Florida to watch the Apollo take-offs, or later the Space Shuttle missions. I sometimes think about those images and think about the camaraderie, and if it's something we're missing out on in this day and age. And then I flip to YouTube and watch another SpaceX launch from the comfort of... literally anywhere. I've watched launches with family, friends, co-workers, students (and all alone at home...). Technological progress has given way to wider accessibility and availability.

My random musing of the week is a tangent off the incredible effort and success of Perseverance - They were able to show in "real time" (12 minutes delayed or so...) the telemetry of the rover and its current state.

How cool would it be to watch an FRC match on Blue Alliance, and be able to see the telemetry of any of the robots in real time! Motor speed, pneumatic actuation, battery drain, and more! Top teams already take data dumps of their robots after each match, but how cool would it be to see just how much every team is pushing the controls limits!

More data, more accessible. It might be something cool.

(It might not.)

-B