Week 6 and still not finished!

[windup zeppelin]

that sounds nerve racking

[alphastryk]

you are beating us...and we are in our 4th year!

[RogerR]

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.

except for the extraordinarily well organized teams, i expect that this is the norm. my team(s) don't have a complete robot yet, either. it reminds me of a cycling quote:

"The best rides are the ones where you bite off much more than you can chew--and live through it."

[Elgin Clock]

Originally Posted by Reyner

9 Days before ship, we found out that our shooter design was 30 pounds too heave, so we're doing a complete overhaul in less than a week. eek.

Better 9 days before ship time, than 9 hours. That would of been even more "fun".

Then again, how you define "fun" is up to you.

[kawelch]

"Show me a man who has not failed...and I'll show you a man who has never tried"

Last night we scrapped our entire design and are putting together a purely defensive bot.

Sophmore blues... we tried to do to much.

[DjAlamose]

Originally Posted by kawelch

"Show me a man who has not failed...and I'll show you a man who has never tried"

Last night we scrapped our entire design and are putting together a purely defensive bot.

Sophmore blues... we tried to do to much.

there is always something you can do to make your robot offensive. It doesn't even have to pick up balls, just hold the ones you get at the beginning of the match and deposit them in a goal. A simple box with a door can do this. But there could be any number of reasons why you have decided to do this. Its better to try and do too much than not enough.

Currently we are behind but last night we put together some parts and now its looking like our robot. CAD just isn't enough to see what the bot is gunna look like.

[ChaosAlchimey]

Right now our fabracation team is working but we have a few last things to wire up and get running our programing is near finished and we have one or two things to build and thats it for now hopefully more problems do not arise.

[lupjohn]

Originally Posted by dtengineering

"because we try to stick with the philosophy "student designed, student built", things just take a long time."

When you follow that philosophy it is hard to go wrong. Before getting involved in FIRST, we used to design and build Electrathon Race cars (1hp motor, student driven, battery-limited, 1hr race, typically 40km/hr for high school cars to 80km/hr for "pros"). Some of the most gifted students I have ever taught worked together on a team and didn't have their car ready for tech inspection by race day. I figured I had kind of let them down, after all... I could have stepped in and ensured that their car was finished on time.

It was the first time, I think, they had ever really failed at anything at school. Two years later (they all went in to UBC Engineering together) they were in a robotics competition as part of a class project. They cleaned up... their robot was ready two weeks in advance, and they were troubleshooting their sensors and code before other teams even had figured out what their wheels were going to be like. Talking to them afterwards, they described their failure at designing and building their Electrathon car as the motivation to "never let THAT happen to them again."

While I suspect your team will get their machine ready to roll by ship date, it doesn't hurt to remember that we are teachers, coaches and mentors. Our first duty is not to the robot, but to the kids.

That said, it sounds like you aren't too badly off... looking at pictures from last year we have one dated February 18th, where we are all gathered around holding a sign reading "119" signifying that we had got the robot back together AND finally met the weight limit... with four days to go until shipping. (But still with wiring problems, no armour for the circuitry, etc.) This year is another race against the clock.

Good luck,

Jason

Jason;
you've made an excellent point. In any scientific (read engineering also) research effort there is always more than one outcome. As mentors/teachers we always hope that the positive answer is success in building the robot on time and that the experience is a positive one for the students. However, it is necessary for any scientist( students included !) to experience the negative answers as well. The absolutely sure solutions without failures only indicate that the answer was known ahead of time and you merely verified the previously answered question. Asking the right question then accepting the results of your research should result from being able to accept either the positive or negative results in an unbiased manner. Many times the only way this can be learned is by experiencing both success and failure. Penicillin itself would never have been discovered by Fleming if he threw away his contaiminated cultures without studying the failure of his cultures to grow in the manner his research hypothesis predicted.

Best wishes for your teams success as they have a mentor assuring the real success of this year's effort. LRU.

[AJL930]

We are also scrambling for time, We accomplsihed some stuff at our meeting yesterday, but overall we dont have our drop door even 25% finished, Our ball collecter is still in pieces on our work tables. The only things that are 95% or more finished are the Chassis, Electrical, and drivetrain. The ball hopper is around 40% finished. To top it all off, we have no crate as well. To make things even worse, we have a scrimmage at Sussex on SUNDAY!!!!!! We are in for a long day tommorrow seeing as how our hours at the shop tommorrow are from 9:00 am to Midnight. Im confident that we will finish but in what kind of timeframe is questionable.

[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.

[Church59]

Congratulations to all the teams who are now on their last weekend. We, that is team 1544, applaud you all for your valiant efforts in trying to build your robot. Good luck with the competition that you are going to go to.

And I, as a member of the above said team would like to personally congratulate all teams who managed to finish, completely, their robot.

Good luck and see those of you, who are going, in Annapolis

[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.