Hi! I’m the Team Captain for team 2637, the Phantom Catz and was looking for some help. My team has already starting to run out of things for people to do so I was hoping to get some help from you guys! We need pre-season projects for: Build, CAD, and Electronics. If anyone could help we would really appreciate it!
There are many things you can do! Are you trying to combine all into a project or projects for each sub team? A fun thing you can do is a t-shirt cannon/launcher, with that you could potentially use it as a business project and rent it out for events (similar to what 254 does). Exploring drive trains can be good for cad and electrical, in addition to mechanical.
Hello, I am the captain for 3196 Team SPORK. One of the things our team did this year was convert our practice robot for the 2016 season to a t-shirt cannon. Something you could do though, to involve all parts of the team, is design a new robot/t-shirt cannon.
Something else I have seen teams do, which we plan to do in the future, is use one of the many model competitions found on chief delphi. This is the closest thing I have seen to build season. However, this is also very time-intensive.
I could offer more suggestions if you tell us what your team has done, because I could ramble on and on about pre-season trainings.
Thank you guys for offering help! So far this pre-season we have built 6"x6"x6" boxes, learned basic electronics, basic CAD (made trains), and everyone worked/is working on a box bot with a turret (CAD is still designing the turret). I’m gunna push for a T-shirt cannon (I’ve wanted one for a while). We also have our systems engineering team working on a mock game and a modular drive station. It would seem like we got enough projects but we have a massive team (over 50 members) and so we are often left with people who have nothing to do. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
This offseason (and last offseason) we opted to build a new robot. If you reuse electronics and the drive train you can very easily build a solid robot for a few hundred dollars. It’s cost efficient and the best way to teach the team in my opinion.
This preseason we are building a radial omni-drive (this is what I call it, to my knowledge it seems to have lots of names). We thought it would build useful skills but also be really fun to drive. I think that a project similar to this is always good; something that will help teach valuable skills, but also generate a product that is cool and everyone can get excited about. Lots of teams do this in the form of a T-Shirt cannon but I think you could come up with a large number of potential things to create.
Hard to make a suggestion without knowing what you “normally” do.
Do you do training sessions for new members? Demo at middle schools? Reorganize your storage/work area?
Try to hold a fun multi-team event. We hosted “totebot” races at our school. Maybe make a small robot/engineering challenge and share it with other teams nearby. Have a networking/competition event.
Last year we created a game with rules for shooting tennis balls. Since its late in the year, you could focus on either the shooter or building a new drive base.
I’ve seen posts where teams have built ping-pong ball shooters. I’m thinking we should do that next year.
Dave
We’ve done the air cannon, and several of the other ideas above. This year, we watched the teaser video and came up with our own game to fit the teaser, and we’re designing and building a robot to play THAT game. We sort of blew through the strategy parts, so we have three actions plus drive that the robot must be able to do. (pick up nerf football; shoot nerf football through a goal made from the lid of a trash can (same size lid as 2015 Recycle Rush), and “actuate a steam valve”.
We also have side projects making workbenches and storage solutions and such to help us cope with our new smaller build space.
Do you have a KoP drive train set? Our team is moving to build that in a meeting or two and use it for more driver training (so we’ll have two bots with similar drive trains to use at the same time), it is really simple compared to building a robot from scratch so the new members can get an easy hold on it, only issue is that CAD won’t be able to do much for it.