Hello everyone! My name is Daniel Rego, I am the Team captain on Team 3161 - Tronic Titans. And welcome to our first build log…
I just wanted to start out by mentioning the situation we are currently facing. Our team runs out of a School in the Canadian Province of Ontario and as some of you may know Ontario has recently moved to online learning meaning that all the work we have done so far has been virtual. We hope to be back in our shop in the 17th though!
DAY 1
Anyways our week started out obviously with Kick off. On this day we split into groups to write down notes on the competition: rules, playing field, objects. As well as starting to break down the manual.
DAY 2
Our next meeting happened on Jan 10th and during this meeting, we ran through quite a few things, mainly information we thought would be important for our new members. We went over the different types/functions of bots. What a perfect offensive bot/perfect defensive bot/realistic bot would be able to do and point values for each one (in theory). As well as starting to come up with our priority list for the season, it is as follows: Drive train, Intake, Shooter, Climber.
DAY 3
Now on the next day, we came up with a rough timeline for what we wanted this year’s build season to look like. After we worked on defining the key traits for all our subsystems, this included (Robustness, Reliability, Consistently accurate (repeatable results), Speed and Versatility. Then lastly we dove a bit into the strategy we want for this year’s game.
DAY 4
Wednesday was a meeting where we really started to get deep into what we really wanted out of this robot. We discussed possible climbers as well as where we wanted to climb to and settled on going for the traversal climb, our main reasoning for this was to help guarantee RP, we figured that this year since at our events we will be playing around half as many qualification matches we need to ensure we are constantly getting RP in order to rank high enough to possibly be alliance captains or be picked. We also discussed some strategies and settled this year on building an upper hub shooter with a turret that is capable of shooting from the launch pad! (we are very excited about this as it will be our first year in our team’s 12-year history attempting a turret). Lastly, we went extremely into depth about possible drive train choices, we discussed both tank and X drive and we decided to create a vote as for us there were equal benefits for both.
DAY 5
On Thursday, our last meeting of the week we were able to decide on our drive train, tank was the ultimate winner. We also discussed possible choices for the number and size of wheels. We landed on 4-inch wheels this year as with the lack of bumps on the field (excluding the cable protector which is very minimal) such as 2020 something like 6 inch would not be necessary, and we also decided to go with a 6wd. In this meeting, we also discussed some parameters we wanted to maintain for this robot, mainly the height. We decided for this year it would be important to fit under the low rung as to not restrict where our bot can drive meaning that on this bot our max height would be around 4’11". Lastly in this meeting, we decided to have 2 intakes, these would be used for 2 purposes, 1 is obviously picking up balls and the other is to hold onto opposing cargo until we are ready to pick up more of our own (it would stay held in the intake rather than in the bots indexing system)
I’ve included a picture below of a mock-up for the bot, which is very rough and used mainly for visualizing the placement of things.
I hope you enjoyed our first build log! Im hoping to post some more updates during the week regarding specific design choices as I know I have not gone too in-depth with this log but if not the next log will be posted this Sunday…
