JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

Hi Everyone,
I've got a challenge for all those mentors out there interested in a design process...

Some of you may know, that last year I recorded my build season on Facebook. This was a simple activity: at the end of every day during the season I would put up a quick post on my Facebook summarizing what we did that day. Nothing complicated.

At the end of the season I compiled all those Facebook posts, and added some context and detail. The result was my 2010 Build Journal.

It is no secret that I'm intrigued by the different design processes that teams use during the build season. I wish I had a way of seeing what other teams do during the 6-weeks, what their methods are, and what their schedule looks like. I have a feeling I'm not the only one.



So here is my challenge -- record YOUR season.
Do what I did, if nothing else... it isn't hard!
Take a few minutes every day and write down what your team did. At the end of the season compile them into one paper and add some detail. That's it.

I'm not asking you to publicly post your season, I'm not asking you to reveal any secrets, all I'm asking is for a glimpse into your process.

So... who will publicly commit to it? Who's up for it?

I'll be doing it again on 148. I'll be adding frequent updates to my blog during the season and posting a full Build Journal at the end of the year (probably before Championship). I hope some of you "hot shot mentors" will join me.

-John

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

Now there were similar threads before about either blogging or filming the build process found here:
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/sh...ad.php?t=87792

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

I was planning on doing this anyways. I enjoyed your build journal last year and thought it was a great idea. It's useful for even looking back at your own build season to see what happened or what could have gone more smoothly.

Edit: I think JVN is going a bit further by encouraging those that wouldn't publicly share there season to record it so the community could have a retrospective look at the season.

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

I'm in.

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

John, Team 1091, will happily take you up on the challenge, as best we can, and would like to share it publicly. Isn't this the meaning of gracious professionalism ? Since we are far from being a powerhouse team, and with limited resources, the best we can contribute is our student's and mentor's ideas and opinions. Due to an extremely limited time allowance, in our school's tech-ed department, we're leaning towards using bamboo, which is lightweight and easily machinable, for our chassis and whatever mechanism we need to build.

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

Way ahead of you. ;)

In all seriousness, thanks for doing such a cool project in 2010; your whitepaper definitely inspired me and Shaker Robotics.

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

We're in. As soon as I renew our domain, I'll get a blog up-and-running.

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

The level to which I will be working with my team(s) is completely up in the air at this point, and could range from more than ever to none at all this year. But if I am significantly involved, I will certainly take a shot at this.

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

I will commit to doing this on behalf of team 125.

I'll update this post with where the best place to follow it will be. Most likely it will be via the nutrons twitter (@nutrons) and my own (@brandonholley).

-Brando

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

973 is in.

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

does it have to be a mentor? I was already planning on setting up something to this effect with our website, so would I have to have a mentor do it or can I

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

I know people will probably want to to this their own way, but would it be possible to have a "Build Log" subforum, where teams could keep their logs? This would keep some of them all in one place. Some other technical forums have similar forums that keep the build logs in one place, like this.

Looking forward to reading them!

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

I'm down.

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

Another reason to use Wordpress?

816 is in.

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

The DiscoBots are all about video logs. We have always kept a weekly media log ( http://2010.discobots.org/node/16 ). We will take the JVN challenge and move up to daily twitter updates this year.

http://twitter.com/discobots

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

I'm in, though there will probably be some rants and ravings about my grad class sprinkled in as well. I wound up pulling a A- in the hardest math class I've ever taken, yet this coming math class (non-linear programming) is [scary math]^2.

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

I'll bring this up in my team. Worst case scenario I'll document the season and upload it afterwards.

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

I'm not trying to 'plug' this here, but I just thought I'd throw a new 'method' to 'document' a season. I really like reading blogs. However, I hate writing blogs about as much as I hate suffering through terrible movies my girlfriend loves. Evernote is a note-taking, picture-saving, webpage caching, stick-note-everywhere web service that is free for most of the things I need it for. It's been incredibly useful for grad school. I've also used it with my phone to make TODO lists, jot down names of people I interact with that I may need to remember later, etc. What makes it really nice is the fact that the same notes I make on my phone can appear the browser plugin on my work computer and full application on my home computer.

In the mean time, I've shared the 2011 robotics folder on my evernote account:
http://www.evernote.com/pub/aticris/robotics2011

And the general folder, since there's already some stuff populated in it (used it as reference material for drive train workshops I taught):
http://www.evernote.com/pub/aticris/roboticsgeneral

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

An easy way to keep track of what you are creating from a model point of view is to add a "Comment" Comments help you to remember why you did what you did in the engineering design process and as you share models and assemblies, it prevents mistakes.

Right-click on the FeatureManager icon in SolidWorks
Select Comment
Enter your comment and save your note.

Marie

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

Good advice Marie! Another Solidworks feature I had no idea existed... Maybe I should get some formal training one of these days!

-John

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

I'm glad to see so much interest in this. I'll reiterate that I'm much less excited about the day-to-day feeds as I am the final compiled papers.

I know we're all going to be busy during the 6-weeks, who has time to follow a bunch of twitter feeds with the proper amount of attention?

-John

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

I did it the past two years for our (Typewriter Repairmen) NURC robot

http://www.selectric.org/nurc10/index.html

but that's a kind of slow motion build...we had months and months to work on it.

I'll have to see if I'd be able to keep up with a post a day on the FRC build. Plus we have a new build place, new teachers, new mentors, and mostly new students...should be an interesting year for the NERDS

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

I uploaded a design poster we used at the regionals and championship. It's not as detailed as a design blog but you can get some of the thought process from it. For example, our kicking mechanism could only kick with one force so we varied the shot distance with software - the poster tells how we did it.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2422

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

I LOVE when teams do handouts like these and this one from 1114 - a really interesting look into the design process and the "why" behind robot features. Keep it up!

These kind of promotional materials are great for everyone - judges learn more about your robot, other teams get a look into your design process, and you get a chance to reflect on the decisions you made and what benefits they had for your robot.

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

I'm in...

Just now how to remember this with the 999 other things I have to do...

--Philip

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

I'm with him ^^.

I will do my best, but keeping myself sane comes first.

(Who is this Johnny 5-9 guy anyway?) :p

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

I've been planning on posting 573's progress here on CD after Kickoff. After talking to a few team members, we also feel that it would be a good idea to do a weekly vlog to go along with our thread. We want to share our ideas and we would also like to hear some feedback on how we are going about things. We have never done a PR 'stunt' like this, so we're hoping that it works to our advantage.

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

We have never done a PR 'stunt' like this, so we're hoping that it works to our advantage.[/quote]

Whenever you share information, we will all benefit. In turn, hopefully, more information from the rest of us, will follow, and in turn help you. Remember, teaching the students, to openly share ideas promotes gracious professionalism. We don't care if our robot moves 10 feet and dies, if instead,we can turn on a student to the sciences.

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

I hope some of you "hot shot mentors" will join me.

-John[/quote]

Aw shucks, John. Nobody probably don't want to read about the design process that us "quiet humble mentors" follow.;)

Jay

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

Thats a great idea. I'm in, and hopefully at least some of 461 will follow suit.
Good luck to all the teams:D

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

JVN,

Sounds like fun! our team already puts a lot of effort into documenting every meeting and event on our blog: http://kbotics.ca/blog/

The hardest part looks like publicly documenting what you are working on without giving the idea away. If someone reminds me I'll try and put it all together from the blog posts at the end of the build season, I remember following your facebook posts last year during build and trying to figure out what you guys were thinking.

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

For text updates, we've added "Update the team Twitter feed after every meeting" to the website team's responsibilities. (Back when I was in high school, I posted daily updates of about tweet length to the team website, but since then no students have updated those pages...). I'll [continue to] post updates to my Facebook from the meetings I'm present at.

As a corollary to JVN's request, for the 2011 season I'd like to get a screenshot of the current SolidWorks model of our robot taken every day throughout the build season. After ship date I'll compile them all together and have them uploaded to the photo galleries on the GUS website to visually show how our design evolves throughout the season.

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

If only that were a problem we needed to worry about....sigh....

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

But guys, won't you lose your competitive edge that way? How will you ever win two regionals? :P

this is a joke post - 1726's complete willingness to share is an inspiration and has served them pretty well in the past, their robots earning two regional wins

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

Kickoff is tomorrow! Just a reminder to start logging your build...

-John

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

In addition to our detailed team notebook -

blog - cyberblue234.wordpress.com

twitter - cyberblue234

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

I'm starting...but I have to reconstruct the first several days, because I forgot to do it. Is everyone else hard at work blogging? :)

http://www.project1726.org/forums/vi....php?f=6&t=691

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

2175 is blogging the build on the team blog:
http://frc2175.blogspot.com/

After seeing the first couple posts I reminded the students that a picture's worth 1,000 words so hopefully most/all posts will be accompanied by a picture from here on out.

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

1511 is doing this in several ways (and I love it - being so far away it STILL feeds my addiction ::sigh::)

Started Long Ago:
1511's Forums (over 12,000 posts!)

Started Last Year:
1511's Daily Blog

Started Two Years ago (now open to public):
1511's Engineering Design Wiki

New This Year:
Livestream of EVERY meeting!

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

I have committed to doing a brief description of each day of the TechnoKats build season. This will be done specifically for people who are not familiar with FIRST or FRC, so I am intentionally not going into great detail. The daily messages are going out to an email discussion group. If anyone would like to follow along as I post my short "journalettes", they are presently being archived here:

http://www.kli.org/tlhIngan-Hol/2011...ry/thread.html

You might guess that they will also begin showing up under a new URL next month:

http://www.kli.org/tlhIngan-Hol/2011...ry/thread.html

Look for messages written by ghunchu'wI' 'utlh and having a subject line beginning with qoqqoqmey. That's Klingon for "so-called robots". The author's handle might be translated approximately as "hacker emeritus".

Oh, did I mention that I'm writing them in Klingon?

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

Elvish is the new Klingon. ;)

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

I don't see myself finishing our website anytime soon (read: during build season). We will be keeping our logs on Facebook.

http://www.facebook.com/bedfordrobotics

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

I'll update through Championship...

jmontois340.blogspot.com

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

I just managed to describe a PID control system in Klingon, using terms that I believe someone unfamiliar with the concept would adequately understand. I admit that I wasn't expecting to find the vocabulary quite up to the task, but it turned out to be much less of a problem than I thought.

I challenge anyone to do that in either Quenya or Sindarin. :p

(Not that anyone will appreciate it, but "robotish things - day eleven" should show up at http://www.kli.org/tlhIngan-Hol/2011.../msg00130.html soon.)

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

So how's everyone doing? I've been keeping up pretty well with mine.

http://www.project1726.org/forums/vi...6&t=691&p=4030

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

We have been posting weekly videos and picture galleries. We also have a section of our website dedicated to the CAD design of the robot.

http://2011.discobots.org/node/11

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

I also have been doing Nightly updates to 2587's email list. I will be compiling these and will have them formatted and posted before Championship.

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

I'm writing so much for grad school I got sick of writing for our season. Some of the students are writing blogs, but they're not very process-oriented and are sporadic (located here). So I fail this year :(. Maybe next year I'll do the writing. I do enjoy reading though!

John, I have a minor itch about your blog. Maybe next year we can get you to say "magnetic flux wielding manipulator 1" (or something else that's vague but easy to remember) instead of "Subsystem X". As a reader, it's distracting to read "Subsystem 0" and it even seems like the guest bloggers mock the naming convention when they call something "subsystem pi". It'd also help me remember if you're reiterating over the same design or creating a new design for the same system as the season progresses. Keep top secret stuff secret, but for 'arm' and 'leg' and 'drive train' it would be nice. I do enjoy reading about the 148 process: it's both humbling and inspiring at the same time.

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

The numbers on the blog correspond to the P/N conventions we use for CAD files. It was an easy way for me to remember them. Next year I'll think about simple nicknames instead... without revealing too much. ;)

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

With a new group of students interested in working on our website this year, we were able to bring back our daily progress updates. While we had to remind them each meeting at first, they've been pretty good lately at keeping this page updated on their own accord.

http://www.team228.org/team/progress/

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

Or consider just telling us what it is your building. I don't think you have to worry about us being able to build a better one!

:rolleyes:

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

So, yeah, I decided to use my class blog for this project: www.coalhot.wordpress.com

Just ignore any class stuff that may come up.

Added bonus: I posted (and will post) some FTC stuff up there...

--Philip

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

In response to JVN's challenge/request I recorded Team 33's day by day progress through the 2011 season in daily journal, posted here.

http://www.chiefdelphi.com/media/papers/2493

Thanks John for encouraging us to do this.
Enjoy.

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

i try to take pictures of the build process robot wise and then post them all to facebook. this year was kind of tough, we worked at Lockheed and they did not like the idea of me taking photos with my iphone in the building and posting them. thus no public record of this years build unless we were off property. we try to get the students to blog, some have, most dont have the time when they are face first in to the robot.

Re: JVN Challenge: Record your Season!
 

On page 15/55 of Jim's journal and really liking it. I like the glimpses of the control systems development.

If I am still with my team next year I am going to attempt to do a control systems side-of-things season journal, which with our team usually lasts long after build season ;)