[Pavan Dave]

Electrical all the way baby!

On our team I guess two thirds of the team is mechanical and one third is electrical. But that could be because we have it set up in that kind of fashion. We have three subgroups and 1 sub-subgroup. The three subgroups would be upper body, base, and controls, and the 1 sub-subgroup was programming which falls under controls. With this past year aside, we have always had more mechanical guys than electrical guys, just because it seems that there is a lot more freedom in mechanical as to how you can design parts and work with the robot.

The exception to this freedom lies this year, as the controls and programming divisions were officially split. This made controls smaller than it usually always is and on top of that this year, we decided to use Pro/E and Inventor to our max, and created a bunch of interesting mounting plates for both our brain and compressor. I am one of the ones on our team that sometimes utilizes a program that makes PCBs so on top of getting some creativity designing mechanical parts and laying out our brain on CAD, I get to design my own boards and stuff which gives me some space and creativity of my own on the electrical side.

I think that controls is near the same every year. Sure you have twists and turns, but the focus is the same every year and you are just improving yourself. With mechanical aspects you are redesigning the way things are done because every years game is different.

Pavan.