Final month preparations
 

There is now a little less than a month 'till kickoff! What little things does your team do during the last month that are usually overlooked by a lot of teams? Obviously there are things like supplies and teaching new students, but are there things that end up being invaluable later on that can be done now? I'm very excited for robots and want to make sure we are all prepared this year. :D

Oh yeah, and I've already thought of going on CD all day. :p

Re: Final month preparations
 

Say goodbye to friends and family :D

Honestly though, I'll be enjoying the calm before the storm. I worked on Christmas Eve and New Years day last year, restoring an old lathe and getting our lab ready. Not this time.

Re: Final month preparations
 

Get your animations and Chairman's award paperwork out of the way before build season starts :D

Planning a pit design ahead of time isn't a bad idea either. As the season progresses you can look back on it and make changes, but it's much easier to start out some good ideas and gradually refine them throughout the season (hey, we forgot something!) than it is to have to think of everything in one go without making mistakes.

Re: Final month preparations
 

I'm spending this weekend comparing VexPro products to some of the other products we traditionally purchase to have on hand, I think this is a good problem to have.

Re: Final month preparations
 

Getting our standard building material ready. Teaching the new kids the process of going thought kickoff. Comparing items from andymark and vexpro. Getting ready for FIRST Choice. Can't wait less then a month to kick off.

Good luck to all the FRC teams this yr.

Re: Final month preparations
 

Get a head start on building the robot. How else are we going to gain an advantage over everybody else? (disclaimer: please adhere to all FRC rules and regulations.)

Start to prepare an area to work in, make sure all your tools and materials are properly organized, and get some new students to practice driving on previous robots and get a feel for what it's like to control 119.99 pounds of aluminium with wheels.

Re: Final month preparations
 

199.99 lbs? Thats it? Lol for 2537, we were at 120.0

Re: Final month preparations
 

120 pounds with battery and bumpers! Thats impressive:p

Re: Final month preparations
 

We are setting up our new mini lathe and mill as well as training students in every aspect of design/fabrication.

I am working out the final CAD designs for a new iteration of our WCD, and getting our stock of alum and parts refilled

Will be a fun season :3

Re: Final month preparations
 

We've actually been in PRE-FRC mode for a month or two now. Some plans fell through the cracks, others are still holding strong.

(1) We're buying things. FIRST Choice, all these PDVs, a weak inventory, and a new found drive means that we need to pick quite a few things. We're placing large orders now, and hopefully, large orders soon after we see the game.

(2) We're training people. This is not only the obvious training in CAD and programming, but rookies are also being brought up on the basic of manipulators/DT/competition/etc. and we're running them through old games. Just, quick, 20-30 minute brainstorming sessions.

(3) We're volunteering. The team is working on putting a bow on our volunteering with a string of FLL events coming up. This means that we will volunteer at FLL events for a solid 3-4 straight weekends.

(4) We're winding down. The end of the school year is upon us, and so we're looking at winding down the team. This means that, everyone gets a chance to think about and contemplate on designs/practices that we will hopefully use during the build season.

Cheers,
- Sunny G.

Re: Final month preparations
 

Well, actually, 120.0 withOUT Battery and bumpers.
Robot Weight (<= 120lbs excluding bumpers, and battery) <R03>
We were that close.

Re: Final month preparations
 

We're fundraising, getting ready to move into our build space, and also working on a couple of engineering projects. We are entering two robots in Vex this weekend and also building a really cool practice FRC drivetrain. It is almost entirely made of Home Depot wood and parts from last year's robot and can support 6 or 8 4" to 8" wheels in omni corners or dropped center configuration. It will be used for testing mechanisms and software for next year's robot and for driver practice.

Re: Final month preparations
 

Tonight we inventoried all our electrical components, down to the last jumper and pwm cable.

We had a 2 hour meeting tonight with mentors and team captains to discuss what new tools we need: it looks like we'll be getting a belt sander / disc sander table combo and a pneumatic riveter. We're also ordering some new components to stress test them before we're confident enough to put them on our robot.

We also discussed our build schedule next year - we have it laid out very specifically.

We discussed all the 'George' jobs early in the season. You always have a lot of extra hands early on, and it's nice to have all your little jobs like crimping wires and pwms to hand to them.

Mechanical inventory and final room cleaning will happen next week.

Re: Final month preparations
 

Good tip. Seems like people slowly start to show up less and less as the build season goes on. Probably good to get stuff done while they're still interested.

Re: Final month preparations
 

Rereading the New Cool before season starts, rapidly finishing up our off season prototypes, prebuilding a practice modular chassis for any type of drivebase, and redoing our robot cart so it will soon be a robot cart and a minicart.

Re: Final month preparations
 

Our team has been preparing now for the last few months. First we went to Ramp Riot, this really helped this year because a bunch of team members are new and have never been to an event before, and the ones that were left had never really worked with the robot, so it was a bunch of hands on training, with some great teams,

Next the team did machine and weld shop training. The teachers for bother classes spent every Tuesday and Thursday for 2 weeks going over safety, and how to operate all the machines, then had hands on work for the kids to do.

After that we had wiring and robot assembly training, using old robots, and assembling the teams t-shirt cannon. As that was going on some students worked on sponsor letters and thank you, we send letters out to almost every business in town, hand delivering some of them.

Also in this time we put together a FLL event for our local teams, this is a for fun event, that give the lego kids a chance to compete one last time. We also put on a FRC demo for the kids so they can see what all we do. The event is open to the public and is a great way to let the community know what all we do.

This past week has been getting our robotics room cleaned up and ready for the season. We spent 2 days going through crates, bins, tool boxes and shelves, weeding out junk and organizing everything the way this years team wanted it. Probably the cleanest the room will be all year long.

The team also meets and starts organizing the different committees for the year, even though a person is in a committee, it doesn't mean they have to do just that job, everyone has the chance to work on what they would like. Each committee has a binder to keep information for the year in, right now they went through last years things and made a folder in each with ideas from last year, this helps get ideas flowing for this season. Over brake the kids are going to be thinking of shirt ideas, buttons, handouts, safety things, and more, that way when the year starts they will have a bunch of things ready to be voted on.

Also over break a few members are going to programming training. The teams main programmer graduated leaving the team with a fresh start. The team has done a bunch more smaller things to help prep, they always keep busy and try to learn as much as they can. For our team the season is never really over.

Re: Final month preparations
 

Were thinking about what are goals REALLY are in the next season. By that I mean how we want to go about playing an FRC game this year. You can play the game drastically differently. You could go hard core, meeting almost everyday, so on... Or you could be in it for the fun (even though I believe the first option is WAY more fun), and things like missing practice will be ok.

Not that strict but I think you get the point. Put another way, how hard are we going to try, because not everyone can accomodate/cope with such a harsh schedule.

Also were discussing and potential features that we really want to consider next year that we didnt this year. For the first time, we are doing intense cad modeling of the robot. This gives us the oppurtunity to add some more complex features, like maybe using sheet metal in the construction this year. As well, the controls team has some awesome stuff that we going to discuss using (Of course only if it proves adventagous in the initial robot design though).