Bayou workshops - save the date

Bayou Regional (LA/MS) area teams,

Workshops. Oct 27.

We’re planning to host workshops for rookie and veteran FRC teams on Saturday, October 27 at Salmen High School in Slidell, LA. Details, topics, and schedule all TBD but largely depending on interest from other teams. We’ll post details here and email them out by the end of this month.

Yes, we know it’s an ACT test date. Sorry.

We’d like to encourage anyone interested in (co-)leading a session or presenting on a topic, suggesting a subject, or wanting to be added to an email list to reply here or send an email to team1912combustion(at)gmail.com.

Thanks!

– Clark Rowley, Team 1912

Clark,
Looking forward to it!

I'm willing to lead or co-lead a presentation on any topic I know anything about; if you have a hole somewhere, let me know.  If not, subjects that come to mind are along the lines of "Making the most of".  These would cover basic uses and some tips and tricks and hacks that I've created or collected over the years.
  • Making the most of the Kit Chassis (I could do an hour or go all day)
  • Making the most of your drill press (thinking an hour)
  • Making the most of Versaframe for manipulators (again an hour, possibly two)

We currently have a build session scheduled for that date; I’ve suggested that we relocate it to Salmen.

Thanks, Gus!

We’re still recruiting presenters, but we’ve had offers for presentations on -

  • Inspection and bumpers, from an experienced robot inspector
  • a Chairman’s Award overview, from an experienced RCA mentor
  • we’d like to pair that with a workshop session on communicating with judges led by members of different teams
  • Intro to CAD - from an engineer who works for one of our sponsors
  • brainstorming techniques and concept generation - from an area team

I think your kit chassis presentation topic would be a great fit.

Bayou area teams,

The 2018 Bayou FRC Workshops will take place on October 27 at Salmen High School in Slidell, LA (300 Spartan Dr, Slidell, LA 70458).

The draft schedule is below. We can still add a session or two based on interest - a team asked about manipulators so we’ll try to pull that together (or someone please volunteer to lead that!).

The RSVP Google Form is online at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdfQCTWPk4LkaJd4pRamKMpAaWSQS9Pw7tTKrbRq_S0YI4Cdw/viewform

The Intro to CAD workshop is scheduled using Solidworks (the basic CAD concepts transfer between software systems). If teams are interested in hands-on, there’s time for them to obtain a free Solidworks license through their FIRST support (see the recent FRC blog post for the link) and install the software before the workshop.

Thanks to 364 Fusion, 5965 Power Struck Girls, FIRST Senior Mentor Clint Brawley, Wendy Holladay, Gus Michel/GeeTwo, Curtis Craig, and an engineer friend from Textron for volunteering to present/lead sessions.

Track A:
8:30-9:30 Getting started with wiring
9:30-10:30 Getting started with pneumatics
10:30-12:30 Getting started with programming with Java

Track B:
8:30-9:30 Team organization and leadership
9:30-10:00 Become a Chairman’s Award team
10:00-11:00 How to talk to judges (workshop)
11:00-11:30 Game analysis
11:30-12:30 Brainstorming techniques

Track C:
8:30-9:30 Getting started with the kit chassis (tips and tricks from GeeTwo)
9:30-10:00 Making the most of your drill press
10:00-11:00 Getting your robot through inspection
11:00-11:30 Bumpers, bumpers, bumpers

Track D:
8:30-?? Getting started with CAD using Solidworks (end time TBD)

Bayou area teams,

We’re looking forward to our first 2018 Bayou FRC Workshops this Saturday. We expect about 50 students/mentors will be participating.

The updated schedule is below - we added an autonomous programming session (thanks, 2992) and moved a few sessions around to accommodate our presenters.

The Google Form to RSVP is still up at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdfQCTWPk4LkaJd4pRamKMpAaWSQS9Pw7tTKrbRq_S0YI4Cdw/viewform

Thanks again to our presenters (364 Fusion, 5965 Power Struck Girls, FIRST Senior Mentor Clint Brawley, Mike Sonnier from 2992, Wendy Holladay, GeeTwo, Curtis Craig, and TGanger).

Track A:
8:30-9:30 Getting started with wiring
9:30-11:30 Getting started with programming with Java
11:30-12:30 Best practices for autonomous programming in FRC

Track B:
8:30-9:00 Become a Chairman’s Award team
9:00-9:30 FRC judging overview (How to talk to judges)
9:30-10:30 Team organization and leadership
10:30-11:30 Game analysis
11:30-12:30 Brainstorming techniques

Track C:
8:30-9:30 Making the most of your drill press
9:30-10:30 Getting your robot through inspection and Bumpers, bumpers, bumpers
10:30-11:30 Getting started with pneumatics
11:30-12:30 Getting started with the kit chassis (tips and tricks from GeeTwo)

Track D:
8:30-TBD Getting started with CAD using Solidworks

Even if you can’t make it this year, if you think of something your team would like to learn more about or share next fall, please let us know.

A great time! Each of the C track workshops seemed to hit exactly the right spot with several of the attendees, and not always students. We had a wide range of students, mostly at the rookie or second year. Quite a surprising number had never used a drill press, so we started right at the beginning. Curtis’ rundown inspection and bumpers will probably save several teams a lot of grief at a tight time. There was a team there who had never used pneumatics before but wanted to try them, and I heard that 1912 is strongly considering a kit chassis this year after building their own for many years to focus more energy on manipulators and practice and autonomous. The size of the event was perfect - we averaged about a dozen on track C, which allowed us to gather around a pair of science tables for these largely practical presentations.

I hope the other tracks went as well - everyone seemed a bit inspired at lunch. Looking forward to next time! And, not that it started too early, but moving this a couple of hours later would put the lunch break in the middle giving a break from the information fire hose.

Edit: The brief from the KoP chassis brief is here, as well as some amplifying points and other KoP suggestions throughout the thread. The drill press brief was totally practical (no power point), but I’ll try to work up some sort of document of what I presented and post in this thread in a reasonable number of days.

Absolutely! We had a good time in Track B as well. Thanks Clark and 1912 for organizing a great event!