Event 3: District Championship!

Event 3: District Championship

"Let's go watch some robots!" a father called out to two small children as they walked down the hill toward Reese Court on the Eastern Washington University campus. Inside, 50 teams from Washington and Oregon were competing on a competition field that, more so than ever, represented a professional sporting or showcase event. A full lighting gantry, real-time commentary, post-match analysis featuring real-time analytics, heatmaps, replays. All of this, for science and technology - for robots. (How amazing is that?)

Event 2: Auburn

Event 2: Auburn

And just like that, our second local competition is done and dusted.

The team had a lot of fun, worked hard, and the results, once again, showed. This event ran in the same format as Glacier Peak - 31 teams, 12 qualification matches for each team, then the top 8 ranked teams would select their 2 alliance partners and play in a double elimination bracket for the event win!

Weeks 9, 10, 11: Everything Changes

Weeks 9, 10, 11 (Between Competitions)

I feel like we've changed something on every subsystem during these weeks between competitions...

By changed, I mean fixed or replaced.

We caught a few breaks with noticing issues, and/or broke a few things ourselves. :-)

Event 1: Glacier Peak

Event 1

Finally the rubber meets the road! Er - carpet!

Week 8: Insight

 Week 8

This was a shorter week for us, mostly because on Friday March 3rd, we loaded into Glacier Peak High School for our first competition of the year! We started the week with some final updates/tuning/drive practice, so, we can start there.

This also seems like a great time to really talk about Insight, the 2023 robot from 7627 Bearcat Robotics. Through these posts you've seen a lot of our journey to get here, but let's reflect and dig into the metal on what makes this particular bot tick.

Week 7: All Together

Week 7

Everything is really starting to come together! Week 7 started our frantic and frenetic competition prep. The robot is pretty much complete, and we're very in the weeds on the details. Time for a whiteboard! We wrote our "burndown" list on the board and started working our way through the items. Mechanical finishing touches on the elevator, lots of electrical completion, tidying, mock inspection to make sure we are fully legal to play, and of course software controls and testing.

Week 6: MVP

Week 6

Having mentored many build seasons (this will be my 10th), it's amazing the patterns that repeat. Pattern 1 is just how quickly build season flies by! Pattern 2 is just how many small details crop up at the last minute.

At the end of week 6, the robot looks 90% complete, we got our first "software bring-up", and ran all the motors for the first time. Great progress from the team, still with 2 weeks to go until competition.

Week 5: Pop!

Week 5

It still amazes me just how quickly a plan can come together. Literally.

Our stack of tubes transformed almost overnight into a robot looking thing!

Not to say it was all smooth sailing, but we laid down a plan: we would hand a robot over to the software team by close of business Saturday, giving them time to start with the initial setup - drivers, firmware, device id's, all that good stuff, and then get to driving, testing, and tuning!

How did we do?

Week 4: Pencil's Down

Week 4

Our build season calendar set a target that we would have a driving, and 1 subsystem running robot.

We sadly didn't quite make that target, but are making excellent progress regardless! The calendar was intentionally challenging to meet every target, to keep us moving forward.

Week 3: All Eyes on Us

Week 3

On top of CAD, our week 3 goals included getting our electrical components placed and starting to mount them into position, and build the mandatory bumpers. Robots flying across the field need something to absorb the inevitable hits!

The engineering teacher at the school has also been working constantly to get our CNC router and waterjet machines operating and controllable. This week the CNC was able to start running through some test parts, in preparation for the flurry of "final" parts that we'll need to start machining very soon!

CAD did come together and is over 95% complete as of Saturday evening. We did our first review, finding mostly finer details issues than large conceptual items to resolve. The students are really learning that the last 10% takes 90% of the time!

Week 2: Communication is Key

Week 2

Quick as a flash, and week two is over. More work, more progress, and a cancelled meeting day due to pending midterms. We weren't able to close out all of our week 2 goals (schedule planners didn't know when school stuff happened /cry), but we made some big strides in the overall design and strategy of the robot. This week was all about refining prototypes, refining the design with higher fidelity components and final geometry. Our software team has been testing new code on a tiny practice robot, and our electrical team unfortunately misread a Slack message, and got lots of practice disassembling and re-assembling the electronics board on our summer robot.

Week 1: A New Beginning

Kickoff Weekend

Every year, a new FIRST Robotics Competition game is introduced to 3000+ high school and similar aged teams across the globe. This kickoff will lay down the ground rules for scoring points, robot restrictions (usually around size and reach), and how events will operate. They don't give any information on what or how to build - teams have to figure that out for themselves!

Here is the game animation the teams saw this past Saturday: (Jan 7th, 2023)