We are 3026 Orange Crush Robotics (OCR)! We are from Delano, MN, work out of Delano HS, and part of the CMNRH. We’re looking forward to experimenting with Open Alliance, and I hope I can keep up and be a bit useful to somebody.
We are a student lead and parent guided team with no industry mentors just doing our best which has been pretty good so far. We have around 15 students 7th to 12th grade. Five are Seniors this year and five are sophomores and the rest are randomly dispersed.
This is my 3rd year as lead mentor and I’m still trying to get everything organized and systematic rather than “whatever happens, happens.” My goals this year are to get our upperclassmen to teach the lowerclassmen how to robot. They’ve been doing the bulk of the work for several years and the younger students need to step up or they’re going to be lost next year. Our younger students need to feel more a part of the team even while doing simple tasks. We also need to set deadlines, if only to see how we “could” be progressing.
Looking forward to Kickoff!
4 Likes
Looking forward to keeping up with your build blog!
2 Likes
We had a great kickoff and the team is enthusiastic about the game. We decided as a group that swerve was still “go.” We then discussed what the different parts of the game were, and almost immediately threw out algae as something to persue to focus on coral and climbing. I broke the team into 3 groups of 5. We found last year that putting the younger kids with the older gave a good blend of experience with “youthful crazy optimisim” provided the older students didn’t just shut ideas down (we discussed that beforehand).
Last year, everyone had the same mechanism, this year we had 2.5. One interesting idea was a 45 degree rotating pivot on the end of the arm so that it would be straight at 0 and pointed down at 180 to place the coral.
We didn’t do much prototyping last year and that really bit us. We are solving that this year by having the younger students build the initial frame and swerve, while the older students prototype and CAD. I’m hoping to have a moving base by end of week 1 programmed by a couple of the students, not just the senior programmers. Senior programmers should be working on vision to set the robot at position offset X,Y relative to the reef april tags.
The first thing tonight will be to set some project goals, if only to watch them wiz by.