What does your team do during the summer?

[apalrd]

Summer:

In the FRC land, we go to the IGVC mini-tournament, MARC, IRI, and Kettering Kickoff. We finished all planned robot improvements for IRI, and ran new drivers at IGVC and MARC, with a new operator at IRI. New drivers will drive at the Kettering Kickoff, too.

We've also been taking the robot to a bunch of schools for demonstration. Most of the kids love it when we shoot foam basketballs.

We also have some *SUPER SECRET* design ideas we came up with during the last season that we want to prototype. Sometimes, the designs Bryan comes up with are just awesome.


We started talking about VRC about a week ago. I go to Kettering now. Kettering has a co-op program, so I will be at work during the summer and winter, and at school during spring and fall. Bryan (BJC) is on the opposite schedule, and one of us will be available for design review or consultation during the VRC and OCCRA seasons (which are almost entirely student-led).

Speaking of VRC, we're having a meeting sometime this week, and we're going to talk about the design process, and we might do a nice high-level game analysis before we properly start talking about robot objectives (but, as usual, individuals have already jumped way ahead and are already drawing concepts in their notebooks). It's really nice to see some of the current students put in the effort to build good VRC robots.

We're also going over code architecture of both my 2012 FRC and 2011 VRC/OCCRA code with the prospective programmers, gearing up for the VRC season. The hope is that they understand the various possible ways to architect embedded software (especially when compared to "traditional" software), and write "good code" in the future. As always, we take existing code architecture or entire blocks and build on it for the new robots.

All of that is just from the engineering side. I'm sure the PR/Marketing guys are busy writing newsletters, preparing for or actually presenting sponsorship presentations and demonstrations, and a bunch of other great stuff.