It’s that time of year, school is starting in the next couple of weeks for many. What are teams doing for new student orientation and training / teaching students what they will need for the build season and kick off? What resources exist? Every year 2170’s process is rather adhoc and would like to formalize the process and improve year over year.
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our team tries to create a balance between useful and frc specific projects and also have some “fun” projects such as last year when we made a pinball machine, or a couple years ago when we made a fully functional go-kart. For FRC specific projects, last year we had some new CADers pair up with veterans and make a hooded shooter, and they also helped CAD out the pinball machine, and a baseball machine for our school as well. for programming we made them an elevator that had adjustable weight that they could experiment with, as well as getting used to the new april tags.
all this to say: we think of last year and what would have been useful, and make that. we also think of this next year and if there’s anything we know about that, and try to work on anything that might be helpful. And finally, we try to have some fun things to work on as well that don’t have to be FRC specific. hope this helps 
Our team has been working on some mini workshops to teach using different tools, as well as some more holistic lesson plans. A lot of this stuff is very much up in the air right now, so I can’t completely expand on things.
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We are working on building a series of bench top elements for programmers to work with. Elevator, Flywheel Ball Shooter, Pneumatic actuators. The first one we built is a “spinner”. This is the design in process for V.2
We laser cut it out of .25 baltic birch and some .125 baltic birch. It is powered by a a NEO direct drive. With V.2 we are planning to have:
- Color Wheel on the back of the disk and a color sensor
- Optical proximity sensor to find the hole on the disc
- Hall Effect Proximity Sensor to find a magnet on the disc
- A limit switch to find a depression in the disc
- A can coder driven from a gear (4 turns of the disc=1 on the cancoder)
- An LED light bar to indicate status back to the operator
All the sensors will be mounted in a 1"x2" 3d print so we can swap them out.
I hope to have a few of these for programmers to work through a series of exercises of increasing complexity. The beauty of the spinner is imperfect code does not crash into anything, it just misses the target.
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