Final month preparations

[Tom Line]

Tonight we inventoried all our electrical components, down to the last jumper and pwm cable.

We had a 2 hour meeting tonight with mentors and team captains to discuss what new tools we need: it looks like we'll be getting a belt sander / disc sander table combo and a pneumatic riveter. We're also ordering some new components to stress test them before we're confident enough to put them on our robot.

We also discussed our build schedule next year - we have it laid out very specifically.

We discussed all the 'George' jobs early in the season. You always have a lot of extra hands early on, and it's nice to have all your little jobs like crimping wires and pwms to hand to them.

Mechanical inventory and final room cleaning will happen next week.

[joelg236]

Originally Posted by Tom Line

We discussed all the 'George' jobs early in the season. You always have a lot of extra hands early on, and it's nice to have all your little jobs like crimping wires and pwms to hand to them.

Good tip. Seems like people slowly start to show up less and less as the build season goes on. Probably good to get stuff done while they're still interested.

[CalTran]

Rereading the New Cool before season starts, rapidly finishing up our off season prototypes, prebuilding a practice modular chassis for any type of drivebase, and redoing our robot cart so it will soon be a robot cart and a minicart.

[Kyle A]

Our team has been preparing now for the last few months. First we went to Ramp Riot, this really helped this year because a bunch of team members are new and have never been to an event before, and the ones that were left had never really worked with the robot, so it was a bunch of hands on training, with some great teams,

Next the team did machine and weld shop training. The teachers for bother classes spent every Tuesday and Thursday for 2 weeks going over safety, and how to operate all the machines, then had hands on work for the kids to do.

After that we had wiring and robot assembly training, using old robots, and assembling the teams t-shirt cannon. As that was going on some students worked on sponsor letters and thank you, we send letters out to almost every business in town, hand delivering some of them.

Also in this time we put together a FLL event for our local teams, this is a for fun event, that give the lego kids a chance to compete one last time. We also put on a FRC demo for the kids so they can see what all we do. The event is open to the public and is a great way to let the community know what all we do.

This past week has been getting our robotics room cleaned up and ready for the season. We spent 2 days going through crates, bins, tool boxes and shelves, weeding out junk and organizing everything the way this years team wanted it. Probably the cleanest the room will be all year long.

The team also meets and starts organizing the different committees for the year, even though a person is in a committee, it doesn't mean they have to do just that job, everyone has the chance to work on what they would like. Each committee has a binder to keep information for the year in, right now they went through last years things and made a folder in each with ideas from last year, this helps get ideas flowing for this season. Over brake the kids are going to be thinking of shirt ideas, buttons, handouts, safety things, and more, that way when the year starts they will have a bunch of things ready to be voted on.

Also over break a few members are going to programming training. The teams main programmer graduated leaving the team with a fresh start. The team has done a bunch more smaller things to help prep, they always keep busy and try to learn as much as they can. For our team the season is never really over.

[dellagd]

Were thinking about what are goals REALLY are in the next season. By that I mean how we want to go about playing an FRC game this year. You can play the game drastically differently. You could go hard core, meeting almost everyday, so on... Or you could be in it for the fun (even though I believe the first option is WAY more fun), and things like missing practice will be ok.

Not that strict but I think you get the point. Put another way, how hard are we going to try, because not everyone can accomodate/cope with such a harsh schedule.

Also were discussing and potential features that we really want to consider next year that we didnt this year. For the first time, we are doing intense cad modeling of the robot. This gives us the oppurtunity to add some more complex features, like maybe using sheet metal in the construction this year. As well, the controls team has some awesome stuff that we going to discuss using (Of course only if it proves adventagous in the initial robot design though).