Week 6 and still not finished!

Originally Posted by Phil Paspalas

WARNING: This is a head coach venting!

It's Sunday at the beginning of week 6, 11am. 14" of the white stuff is on the ground and still falling! 2nd year in FIRST and the robot still isn't finshed. Chassis, done! Electrical panels mocked up but not fabricated in polycarbonate yet. Shooter, done. Tilt and swivel assembly for shooter about 65% done. Ball collector/conveyor, about 50%. Ball hopper, less than that. Crate, not built yet! Like last year, we have a great design, but because we try to stick with the philosophy "student designed, student built", things just take a long time. Programming, 85% done. We are submitting an Inventor design for the 1st time along with a 3ds Max animation. Animation, done; Inventor submission, not yet. Website, done and being updated daily! Chaimans award submission, in progress; Woodie Flowers Award, the same. We are doing outreach to a team in a local urban area. 2 of 3 engineer/mentors are currently out of the country. 2 of our teacher/advisors are inactive because of work/family obligations. I guess we bit off more than we could chew, again! We'll get it all done, but...I just wish we could figure this out.

Phil Paspalas
Head Coach - Team 1676
The Pascack Pioneers
2005 NJ Rookie All-Stars
Runner-up: Montclair Mayhem
Champions: Ramp Riot (Thanks 25!)

Hey at least u guys HAVE students..

I'm practically the only student building along with 2 mentors, the rest...

plays dodgeball

[Freddy Schurr]

Yeah, well Team 204 has some more work to do, we are the entirely finish but like 65% done. We are still working on some stuff and finishing trying to get more sponsors for us to attend the Championship.

[Sgraff_SRHS06]

Originally Posted by Freddy204

Yeah, well Team 204 has some more work to do, we are the entirely finish but like 65% done. We are still working on some stuff and finishing trying to get more sponsors for us to attend the Championship.

Ditto. Same with us. Even though we have the promise of our local school board to pay the expenses if we get in the hard way.

EDIT: We have been able to drive the robot for about 2 weeks or so. Our mechanism is about 90% complete and our only lag time now is in controls and programming, where we still have to fix our stuff for our geartooth counters and our gyros. We also still have to mount our camera. Which we should be able to do this week. As I keep reinforcing, we will be ready for our scrimmage at the National Building Museum on Saturday.

[sanddrag]

With reference to the real robot (not prototypes), we have our frame machined and welded. The machining for everything is probably 2/3-5/7 complete. The conveyor has not been started. No assemby has taken place. However, we have been programming non-stop since the start of week 2.

[hayakuneko]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

With reference to the real robot (not prototypes), we have our frame machined and welded. The machining for everything is probably 2/3-5/7 complete. The conveyor has not been started. No assemby has taken place. However, we have been programming non-stop since the start of week 2.

to add to that... we also have a flag-pole holder!

[imax48236]

Originally Posted by Cpt_Dave_Lister

Hey at least u guys HAVE students..

I'm practically the only student building along with 2 mentors, the rest...

plays dodgeball

We have a few guys like that on our team. It's either dodgeball or Star-Wars fansites.

[Nimmy]

atleast you guys have mentors, we only have 2 teachers and only one of them is present at any given time...

[Erin Rapacki]

Yup... what robot?

[Pontchartrain]

Originally Posted by imax48236

We have a few guys like that on our team. It's either dodgeball or Star-Wars fansites.

I wanna smack the freshmen. I really do. Especially our Star Wars loving friend. When they're not goofing off, they screwing up. And there's too many of them.

If 1701's freshmen are the future, it's going to be a sad, sad future.

[Tomasz Bania]

Originally Posted by Cpt_Dave_Lister

Hey at least u guys HAVE students..

I'm practically the only student building along with 2 mentors, the rest...

plays dodgeball

I can say the same but in a different way:

I'm 1 of the only 2 FRESHMEN actually doing something productive.

To give you a better perspective, of our 28 person team (not including mentors), 50-60% are freshmen. That means we have 13 freshmen just running around and it gets really annoying. I'm not saying that a team shouldn't have any fun, but when we need to do something, it needs to be done.

Today we had the 4 people from our team that put the most time (other than the mentors) into robotics. We were able finish de-bugging everything in the 2 hours we had. Yesterday we had two hours also to debug, but with 15 people just running around testing the robot just wasn't an option. Even though i'm on the support team, I basically do a little bit of everything (except for wireing and programming). In one day (today) I was able to learn more about the robot than I had in the whole six weeks.

Getting back to the topic...

Teams should be better organized. Our team got everything except for programming done in 4 weeks...

Originally Posted by Pontchartrain

I wanna smack the freshmen. I really do. Especially our Star Wars loving friend. When they're not goofing off, they screwing up. And there's too many of them.

If 1701's freshmen are the future, it's going to be a sad, sad future.

You can't say that about all freshmen. I agree Freshmen can act stupid and mess up, but Freshmen like me are the ones that actually do something.

I don't mean to brag, but this is what I have done this year beyond what I was assigned to...

-Ordered shirts for my team
-Ordered giveaways for my team
-Created some content for the team website
-Host of FSN at Detroit Regional
-Host of FSN at Palmetto Regional
-Signed up for Pit News
-Arranged Hotels for my team

Luckily the rest of the team is fully backing me for FSN so I'm happy.

GOOD LUCK WITH YOUR ISSUES

Tomasz Bania

[Spindash54]

We're having a fun time with T-Minus 2 days.

We're overweight, haven't installed everything yet, still figuring out pnumatics code, haven't even gotten the wood for the crate yet, AND...

We haven't turned it on yet ONCE!

See ya tuesday!

not all freshmen are bad. but those on are team barely work, and the work they actually do is done poorly. last year i was the only freshman on the team, but i did quality work. this year one freshman is either:
a) on a Star Wars fan site
b) making a lightsaber on Autocad
c) pretending that a meterstick is a lightsaber and is swinging it around
or
d) pretending to stab people in the back with a giant screwdriver

[Rick TYler]

If you have students who aren't contributing, there are two good answers and one bad one. First, the best solution:

Senior team members each take one or two rookies under their wing and teach them how to be productive. It's called "leadership."

The second-best solution:

Your adult mentors solve the problem by spending time bringing the new students up to speed. This is suboptimal because it means that they are not focusing on strategy and program management. Mentors should only handle this if the older students are unwilling or incompetent to provide leadership.

The worst solution:

Make the rookies feel uncomfortable. Make sure you only give them scut work to do. Make fun of them. Leave them out of strategy and design discussions. Let them know you think they are inferior. Then, they will drop off the team and you won't have to worry about them anymore! Of course, in a couple of years your team won't exist any more, but at least you won't have to deal with those annoying rookies.

[KTorak]

Rookies tend to be left out of things. It's hard to teach them something in the middle of build season...especially when you are doing things quickly to complete them.

Example, I was trying to hurry up and get the GTS sensor soldered so I could try it out and make sure it would work. While doing so, a rookie was watching me and said "I want to learn to solder, can I help?" and it caught me off guard. I figured, what the heck, it was a rookie who is always there, always helping...sure, I could take the 15 minutes to teach him the right way to do it. After I taught him, he went back and properly soldered the switches for auton, disable, and another secret one on the OI with another member. I was really surprised by his work. But it just goes to show you that rookies can be very useful and work very well.

As for being done with the robot...I say...95%+. We're just doing some minor work (aka programming) and a few tweaks to the design.