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Week 6 and still not finished!
:( WARNING: This is a head coach venting!
It's Sunday at the beginning of week 6, 11am. 14" of the white stuff is on the ground and still falling! 2nd year in FIRST and the robot still isn't finshed. Chassis, done! Electrical panels mocked up but not fabricated in polycarbonate yet. Shooter, done. Tilt and swivel assembly for shooter about 65% done. Ball collector/conveyor, about 50%. Ball hopper, less than that. Crate, not built yet! Like last year, we have a great design, but because we try to stick with the philosophy "student designed, student built", things just take a long time. Programming, 85% done. We are submitting an Inventor design for the 1st time along with a 3ds Max animation. Animation, done; Inventor submission, not yet. Website, done and being updated daily! Chaimans award submission, in progress; Woodie Flowers Award, the same. We are doing outreach to a team in a local urban area. 2 of 3 engineer/mentors are currently out of the country. 2 of our teacher/advisors are inactive because of work/family obligations. I guess we bit off more than we could chew, again! We'll get it all done, but...I just wish we could figure this out. :eek: Phil Paspalas Head Coach - Team 1676 The Pascack Pioneers 2005 NJ Rookie All-Stars Runner-up: Montclair Mayhem Champions: Ramp Riot (Thanks 25!) |
Re: Week 6 and still not finished!
You are much further along that we are.
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same here... we just drove for the first time yesterday, and we found a few problems
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Ya..I gott admit same here.. We have quite a bit to do this week.
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well 1568, is almost done but big problems lie ahead...we have about a week left and:
the shooter is done but not mounted, yesterday we finished the ball pick up mechanism and mounted it...works with a 99.9 % accuaracy by the way, we still need to mount and build a hopper.. Just for kicks: the bot..Regit 2 weighs 101 lbs, without the battery, but, this is one of the things FIRST is about...teamwork and countless manhourrs to build a highly effective bot...good luck to all the teams out there still building away |
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I'm practically the only student building along with 2 mentors, the rest... plays dodgeball |
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Yeah, well Team 204 has some more work to do, we are the entirely finish but like 65% done. We are still working on some stuff and finishing trying to get more sponsors for us to attend the Championship.
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With reference to the real robot (not prototypes), we have our frame machined and welded. The machining for everything is probably 2/3-5/7 complete. The conveyor has not been started. No assemby has taken place. However, we have been programming non-stop since the start of week 2.
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From the sound of things you guys will be fine. So relax. |
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there is ONLY one way to have your robot done 1 week before ship date so that your drivers can have practice before it goes in the crate:
Schedule and Milestones. BEFORE the kickoff you must have a schedule that indicates what must be done by the end of each of the 6 weeks. Those accomplishments are your major milestones. If you dont meet your milestones by the end of the 1st week, you must either pull an all nighter (that weekend) to get back on schedule, or revise your plans to make your robot simpler. Every weekend its the same - project status review and if needed a plan to recover or simplify. Once you are behind schedule its very difficult to catch up. If you let your milestones slip for 4 or 5 weeks, you are in deep weeds! If you could not do a task 2 weeks ago how will you magically do it this week, along with all the other things that are suppose to get done this week? Project management is crucial for a successful FIRST team. Project management is crucial for every successful engineering team! |
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I know the feeling, this is my 6th year in First and every year we have our struggles. Believe me it will hopefully come together just keep on moving forward and try not to look back on what has happened in the last 5 weeks. Good Luck!
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we are done with our robot completely
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I remember tossing an idea around right after kickoff of having the officers inform the rest of the team that we only have 5 weeks to finish this year... just to assure we'll have a good week to test and stuff. Deadlines seem to have some motivation in them. Oh well, one week to go, we just have to make sure we have a robot by then. |
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You'll finish. You are further along than we have been in during previous years. Remember that most teams have a 3 day weekend due to President's Day. My team actually has Friday-Monday off becuase Friday is a teacher inservice day and Monday is President's Day.
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"because we try to stick with the philosophy "student designed, student built", things just take a long time."
When you follow that philosophy it is hard to go wrong. Before getting involved in FIRST, we used to design and build Electrathon Race cars (1hp motor, student driven, battery-limited, 1hr race, typically 40km/hr for high school cars to 80km/hr for "pros"). Some of the most gifted students I have ever taught worked together on a team and didn't have their car ready for tech inspection by race day. I figured I had kind of let them down, after all... I could have stepped in and ensured that their car was finished on time. It was the first time, I think, they had ever really failed at anything at school. Two years later (they all went in to UBC Engineering together) they were in a robotics competition as part of a class project. They cleaned up... their robot was ready two weeks in advance, and they were troubleshooting their sensors and code before other teams even had figured out what their wheels were going to be like. Talking to them afterwards, they described their failure at designing and building their Electrathon car as the motivation to "never let THAT happen to them again." While I suspect your team will get their machine ready to roll by ship date, it doesn't hurt to remember that we are teachers, coaches and mentors. Our first duty is not to the robot, but to the kids. That said, it sounds like you aren't too badly off... looking at pictures from last year we have one dated February 18th, where we are all gathered around holding a sign reading "119" signifying that we had got the robot back together AND finally met the weight limit... with four days to go until shipping. (But still with wiring problems, no armour for the circuitry, etc.) This year is another race against the clock. Good luck, Jason |
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Yeah
We're pretty far behind and snow didn't help. We don't have a running chassis yet. The only thing that works, so far, is the storage. |
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WE are still behind where we want to be but we'll make it wvwn if we have to pull an all nighter at someone's house.
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no matter what happens it can't be worse than our robot from two years ago
it's still not finished :( but, we went with what we had and were second seed in the L.A. regional :D edit: I noticed this quote earlier in the thread "because we try to stick with the philosophy "student designed, student built", things just take a long time." and I would like to say that it's not nessassarily true the mentors on our team offer great advice and we could definatly not function as a group with out them, but we have some students who can design and/ or fabricate as fast or faster than them in some cases |
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OK, It's 1:54AM on the due date of the visualization, it's not done, And I'm on chiefdelphi :)
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So much to do.... so little time. The snow delay has hurt us. :ahh: |
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Robot?! you mean we're supposed to be building a robot?! man how am I going to break the news to the team? JK lol, my mind is really racing now. we don't have an autonomous code worked out yet so I get to stay glued to my laptop all week now and still waiting for the hopper and launcher to get done. We finally had a successful launch on Saturday.
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LET ME TELL YOU WHAT, i am church59 of team 1544, if you think you are behind...oh well. we defintaly are i know because of all the snow,volcanoes, rain, ice and wind and yet we still are far behind. CAN SOMONE GIVE US AN EXTRA WEEK PLEASE???!!!??? :) :) no we dont even have a good ball picker uper or even hopper. this is kinda stressful just like last year.
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last year, we end up breaking our whole robot two days before the shipping date. I still remember we put in straight 32 hours of work to get it done on time.
This year, we are 95% done and as of now just practicing. We kinda foreshadow the snow, and shippied our robot to one of our member's kitchen!!. now we work there and eat at the same time......hahaha but good luck to everyone. Thats actually FIRST is all about..! :) |
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After the second year, we figured out the only way to have a shot at finishing is to go 7 days a week from the kickoff. Last year we were on track to have the robot done during week 5 but I ended up in the hospital with pneumonia for the last two weeks of the build. :( This year we're behind schedule in that the electrical isn't done so everything else can't be tested. We've been going 7 days a week but there seems to have been little urgency among the students until this past weekend. There would be students around for a few hours a day but around 5:30 pm it would be pretty quiet around the lab.
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Hey man, don't worry. We've finished robots at the regionals. One year we finished the controls board between practice matches.
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The Following blurb is four years old but is funny.
My freshman year, we were behind a rookie team in the pits. They literally shipped their crate with the parts in there (Details were never made known to many...). We helped build their robot and they finished not that far ahead of us in the competition. So do not feel so bad about being behind in the sixth week! |
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dont worry... we're not as done as we'd like to be either.
in the end, everything will come together magnificiently. and if you cant finish by ship date, put everything you need in the crate and finish it at the venue. there's no shame if you're still working come the Thursday of competition--and if you really are pinched for time, dont be afraid to ask another team for help. :) we're all here to help each other. |
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Yea it Doesn't help here, all that sunshine 74 degrees today, the team always wants to throw poof balls at each other. Nah I'm kidding no snow here though, but i think everyone is struggling a bit but will all get there. Remember 2 years ago at nationals a team build their robot at Nat's due to it being lost during shipping and i believe they were in the national finals or semis so don't give up hope.
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Our mechanical team is a little farther along, as is electrical, but they won't let us programmers use the bot, so we have no idea what is and isn't working!
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9 Days before ship, we found out that our shooter design was 30 pounds too heave, so we're doing a complete overhaul in less than a week. eek.
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our building process is about to stall because parts we rush ordered a week ago haven't arrived. we'll be lucky to get 2 full days of testing
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i dont want to sound like im bragging or anything but 1712 has a 99% finished robot as of today, we still just need to finish autonomus programming. |
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so we sent it to a carpenter, it's not part of the robot so we don't consider it. up untill a few days ago I thought MOST teams design and build their own bots (and I don't mean assemble pieces manufactures by factories\engineers) I mean that's the whole point? how many teams don't build\design their own bots? just wondering... |
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There is actually a really lengthy discussion on that here: http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...2&page=1&pp=15 , from last season. But for the record, my teams robot is all student/designed and built, however FIRST wrote *negative* comments on our Chairmens Award saying that we needed more Mentors involved and the such. |
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Most of this rally has been in the areas of our hopper and shooter, which has made us quite appreciative of CAD software, lest we'd have more scrap aluminum than the recycling bin at a Coca-Cola shareholder's convention. We're going to be close to the wire on just about everything (time, weight, sanity), but I really think we've got this. |
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We have a few guys like that on our team. It's either dodgeball or Star-Wars fansites. |
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atleast you guys have mentors, we only have 2 teachers and only one of them is present at any given time...
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Yup... what robot?
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Haha.....we are soooo far behind....we still just have a chassis.....we are going crazy!!! :ahh:
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Just tweaking the final product, I'm glad we haven't had to make any major changes...now wel''l just have to cross our fingers once we go through inspection...we're using the right brand of pnuematic cylinders this year....
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I think our team is in for the longest and most memorable week 6. We still have not gotten our fram and it is a week before ship. We have every thing else done and ready to go into and on the robot. The biggest week 6 rally is inniated as of today.
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We're goin until at least 10 every day from now to the end. We have the whole frame built but still many things to do.
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EDIT: We have been able to drive the robot for about 2 weeks or so. Our mechanism is about 90% complete and our only lag time now is in controls and programming, where we still have to fix our stuff for our geartooth counters and our gyros. We also still have to mount our camera. Which we should be able to do this week. As I keep reinforcing, we will be ready for our scrimmage at the National Building Museum on Saturday. |
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that sounds nerve racking
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you are beating us...and we are in our 4th year!
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"The best rides are the ones where you bite off much more than you can chew--and live through it." |
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Then again, how you define "fun" is up to you. :ahh: |
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"Show me a man who has not failed...and I'll show you a man who has never tried"
Last night we scrapped our entire design and are putting together a purely defensive bot. Sophmore blues... we tried to do to much. |
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Currently we are behind but last night we put together some parts and now its looking like our robot. CAD just isn't enough to see what the bot is gunna look like. |
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Right now our fabracation team is working but we have a few last things to wire up and get running our programing is near finished and we have one or two things to build and thats it for now hopefully more problems do not arise.
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you've made an excellent point. In any scientific (read engineering also) research effort there is always more than one outcome. As mentors/teachers we always hope that the positive answer is success in building the robot on time and that the experience is a positive one for the students. However, it is necessary for any scientist( students included !) to experience the negative answers as well. The absolutely sure solutions without failures only indicate that the answer was known ahead of time and you merely verified the previously answered question. Asking the right question then accepting the results of your research should result from being able to accept either the positive or negative results in an unbiased manner. Many times the only way this can be learned is by experiencing both success and failure. Penicillin itself would never have been discovered by Fleming if he threw away his contaiminated cultures without studying the failure of his cultures to grow in the manner his research hypothesis predicted. Best wishes for your teams success as they have a mentor assuring the real success of this year's effort. LRU. |
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We are also scrambling for time, We accomplsihed some stuff at our meeting yesterday, but overall we dont have our drop door even 25% finished, Our ball collecter is still in pieces on our work tables. The only things that are 95% or more finished are the Chassis, Electrical, and drivetrain. The ball hopper is around 40% finished. To top it all off, we have no crate as well. To make things even worse, we have a scrimmage at Sussex on SUNDAY!!!!!! We are in for a long day tommorrow seeing as how our hours at the shop tommorrow are from 9:00 am to Midnight. Im confident that we will finish but in what kind of timeframe is questionable.
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If 1701's freshmen are the future, it's going to be a sad, sad future. |
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Congratulations to all the teams who are now on their last weekend. We, that is team 1544, applaud you all for your valiant efforts in trying to build your robot. Good luck with the competition that you are going to go to. :)
And I, as a member of the above said team would like to personally congratulate all teams who managed to finish, completely, their robot. Good luck and see those of you, who are going, in Annapolis |
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I'm 1 of the only 2 FRESHMEN actually doing something productive. To give you a better perspective, of our 28 person team (not including mentors), 50-60% are freshmen. That means we have 13 freshmen just running around and it gets really annoying. I'm not saying that a team shouldn't have any fun, but when we need to do something, it needs to be done. Today we had the 4 people from our team that put the most time (other than the mentors) into robotics. We were able finish de-bugging everything in the 2 hours we had. Yesterday we had two hours also to debug, but with 15 people just running around testing the robot just wasn't an option. Even though i'm on the support team, I basically do a little bit of everything (except for wireing and programming). In one day (today) I was able to learn more about the robot than I had in the whole six weeks. Getting back to the topic... Teams should be better organized. Our team got everything except for programming done in 4 weeks... Quote:
I don't mean to brag, but this is what I have done this year beyond what I was assigned to... -Ordered shirts for my team -Ordered giveaways for my team -Created some content for the team website -Host of FSN at Detroit Regional -Host of FSN at Palmetto Regional -Signed up for Pit News -Arranged Hotels for my team Luckily the rest of the team is fully backing me for FSN so I'm happy. GOOD LUCK WITH YOUR ISSUES Tomasz Bania |
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We're having a fun time with T-Minus 2 days.
We're overweight, haven't installed everything yet, still figuring out pnumatics code, haven't even gotten the wood for the crate yet, AND... We haven't turned it on yet ONCE! See ya tuesday! |
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not all freshmen are bad. but those on are team barely work, and the work they actually do is done poorly. last year i was the only freshman on the team, but i did quality work. this year one freshman is either:
a) on a Star Wars fan site b) making a lightsaber on Autocad c) pretending that a meterstick is a lightsaber and is swinging it around or d) pretending to stab people in the back with a giant screwdriver |
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If you have students who aren't contributing, there are two good answers and one bad one. First, the best solution:
Senior team members each take one or two rookies under their wing and teach them how to be productive. It's called "leadership." The second-best solution: Your adult mentors solve the problem by spending time bringing the new students up to speed. This is suboptimal because it means that they are not focusing on strategy and program management. Mentors should only handle this if the older students are unwilling or incompetent to provide leadership. The worst solution: Make the rookies feel uncomfortable. Make sure you only give them scut work to do. Make fun of them. Leave them out of strategy and design discussions. Let them know you think they are inferior. Then, they will drop off the team and you won't have to worry about them anymore! Of course, in a couple of years your team won't exist any more, but at least you won't have to deal with those annoying rookies. |
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Rookies tend to be left out of things. It's hard to teach them something in the middle of build season...especially when you are doing things quickly to complete them.
Example, I was trying to hurry up and get the GTS sensor soldered so I could try it out and make sure it would work. While doing so, a rookie was watching me and said "I want to learn to solder, can I help?" and it caught me off guard. I figured, what the heck, it was a rookie who is always there, always helping...sure, I could take the 15 minutes to teach him the right way to do it. After I taught him, he went back and properly soldered the switches for auton, disable, and another secret one on the OI with another member. I was really surprised by his work. But it just goes to show you that rookies can be very useful and work very well. As for being done with the robot...I say...95%+. We're just doing some minor work (aka programming) and a few tweaks to the design. |
Re: Week 6 and still not finished!
Two days ago, our drivetrain? Finished. Our shooter? Finished. Our gearchange? Finished. Our Spiral ball holder? Finished. Our aquistor? Finished. And yet, it has taken us until today, having 20 hours of lab time, to put it all together, and semi work. A lot of kinks to work out though.
Also, I know this is a bit off topic but i have some questions. What do those colored squares mean on the head of each post? I've heard various things from rankings, to posts, to whatever, but can you just send me a pm? Or write to me a nathan.bixler@gmail.com |
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