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Unread 12-03-2014, 14:56
Thad House Thad House is offline
Volunteer, WPILib Contributor
no team (Waiting for 2021)
Team Role: Mentor
 
Join Date: Feb 2011
Rookie Year: 2010
Location: Thousand Oaks, California
Posts: 1,107
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Re: Team 4488 Shockwave Introduces: Wildfire

Quote:
Originally Posted by Monochron View Post
I'm actually interested in knowing a little more about your team than your robot.

You are a second year team right? How did you get the ability to powder coat your metal? Did you scout for a potential sponsor who would do that for you? What made you decide to go with your own chassis and drive train, most second year teams stick to the KOP version for simplicity. Did you have a mentor who was very confident in building it yourselves? It looks like that design took some CAD work, if so how did you get your students that proficient in CAD in only 2 years?

Looks great by the way. Solid performer and even solider image
Yes this is just our second year as a team. We have a decent amount of mentors that have been around FRC for many years, so we have had experience with powdercoating and custom drives. For the powdercoating, it was graciously donating by the company one of our mentors works at. As for the drive, we even ran a custom chassis last year as well. The reason is that our mentors have much more experience with custom WCD's then the KOP chassis, and we felt much more comfortable going with what we knew then going with the kitbot. It allows us to be much more customization to our needs, and it performs great. And with kids that know how the custom drives work, I don't see us ever going to a kitbot, because the team is fairly fast at machining all the parts needed.

As for CAD, the robot was 100% cadded by the students before we built it. Over the summer we ran CAD workshops to teach the students more about what was needed. Many of those students wanted to know more, so they actually learned more CAD during their free time before build season. We had dedicated students that wanted to perform, so they did everything they could to prepare for the season.

I'm amazed and absolutely impressed by what the students were able to pull off this year. They all did a great job, and we are so proud of all of them.
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All statements made are my own and not the feelings of any of my affiliated teams.
Teams 1510 and 2898 - Student 2010-2012
Team 4488 - Mentor 2013-2016
Co-developer of RobotDotNet, a .NET port of the WPILib.