Ship Day is in: Error - Ship Day is not defined!
Well, I hope everyone is having a good first week of build. Any wins y’all wanna share?
We had a nice snow storm - it was pretty watching it come down and with the temps we’re expecting this weekend it should be pretty well gone by Monday.
I’ve been enjoying watching folks working on robots even if I’m not with a team this year.
yippee! It’s time for weekly wins!
Our team has had an amazing start of the year, electrical is ahead of schedule (1st time ever) and i finished cad for our mate bot (underwater) and I’m putting a roborio in it cause I don’t want to deal with anything else right now
At work I made some good changes to existing projects and started on my next major set of web services. We had a demo today with my software as the focal point and it went really well. I’m hoping that means some more sales!
Robotics related wins, I got to watch @brandonmcd participate in one of the Ri3D groups this season. First time I’ve seen one of our alums participate!
The Team Management game (FRCZero hosted) | itch.io hosted version I’ve been working on got an update after feedback from a non-frc person who played the game, curious what FRC was. My plan of getting FRC and FIRST in front of a crowd who has never heard of it seems to be working slowly.
Itch.io Analytics so far after about a week of being live
I’m having a blast doing robots again.
I would write more, but I’m having too much fun.
Robot concept coming along very nicely, this is a fun game tradoff wise and probably will see the nost diverse robots since the early 2000s which is really cool.
Managed to get local cache working with Pairwise: Practical upshot you only need intermittent internet access now to scout. I am quite pleased with it.
Edited some dissertation stuff, managed to get into 799 (dissertation project hours).
I have a very special announcement to make this week!
Me and my team are applying to present a conference at the 2025 FIRST Championship!
Also I got this really cute persona 3 lanyard for my id badge.
Moved back in to college this week and started my new classes, which was alot of fun. Though I did give myself the challenge of having to run between two buildings in ten minutes for one of my classes so hopefully that doesn’t prove to be a problem lol.
The Esports center at my college had an expansion, so I attended their grand reopening which was a ton of fun, and the food was really good.
I designed a Game in my Game design class (what a revolutionary concept) which was basically Mario party but worse, but I had a lot of fun doing it.
I also went to a small painting event held by my college and drank lots of hot cocoa, and painted what they called the “Chicago Starry Night”
Came back home this weekend for work and thankfully didn’t miss the bus from the train station even though the train got delayed, so I’ll count that as a win (even if I had to wake up was earlier than normal to make the train). It was snowing so my journey to the train station was quite pretty, however I did almost land on my face a few times lmao.
Went away for the weekend with my friends. It was a really nice place and we all had a really good time! (Especially because we had a foosball tournament and I demolished everyone)
My team has done prototyping very fast this year and it’s looking like our CAD will be a lot faster this year after we changed our workflow. I’m hoping we’ll have a mostly put together robot by the end of the month which would be a massive improvement over past years.
Literally just finished the most productive week of my life with regard to the Electrical Documentation I have been doing. Just finished writing the introduction (last part ironically) of the main manual, and its now published on the website! I did some calculations and I just about doubled the amount of pages in the manual since December 25th, when the last progress was really made, so I’m excited. Doubly so since this also means my CAS project is now 2/3 rather than 1/3 done! I’ll probably make some post about the electrical manual here at some time later after a little bit of refinement is done, and approvals yadda yadda, its on the website so it should be fine anyways.
Oh yeah, and also survived school, which is a lot harder, one of my classes should be ending tomorrow so that will be fun to get to wake up slightly later, or wake up at the same time and get some robot work done.
About to finish my third of 3 “real” OA posts in ~1 week. This has been an interesting start to the season. The team has been quite productive in terms of coming up with ideas, but not at finding ones we love just yet.
Field build went great yesterday. We got everything cut for a full REEF, and got pretty close to 2 of the 6 bases assembled. I was so busy working on them that I didn’t get a single photo or video all day! (Which is quite odd for me during this part of the season)
Busy week.
At work I got to participate in another Homeland Security Critical Infrastructure Security Assessment. The best part of these is the physical security walkthrough where you get to go places you don’t ordinarily get to, like between the inner and outer dome on our administrative building.
We’re having a great build season so far, and I think prototyping week is one of my absolutely favorite weeks. Also, for the only time in my memory we are ahead of the gantt chart instead of behind!
Also, I have my new “favorite” student, I was observing a prototyping group which happened to be all girls and I commented how cool this was to see because I spent 4 years in high school shop classes and there were no girls in any of those classes. One of the girls asks “ geez, how old ARE you?”. “62.” “Wow, I thought you were like 47”
Also, my daughter taught me how to MIG weld (making the cage). [Remember I’m a 
and all we learned in shop was Arc and Oxy welding].
Finally, we and Wildcard Robotics went down to help our friends Team ICE build their full field that they graciously share with all the local teams. At least to me, it is so helpful to actually experience a real field and see the sight lines and so on.
You’re 62
I did not expect that.
KAI FACE REVEAL!!!
I am being statistic, I know what he looks like, there’s been many weekly wins where I talk about us hanging out.
Sad face? Yikes!
(we had our daughter at 43 which keeps us young at heart)
When my mom was 43 my oldest brother was 18 
this is what you chose to contribute to weekly wins?!?
I paid a visit to 751 for the first time this season (and proceeded to completely forget to take pictures). I was told since I can’t work on “robot things”, I should do some admin work, so I helped disassemble a field element, and organize our gears, pulleys, and belts. Apparently, I did a pretty good job.
In other news, I went back to college, and have started my classes. Last semester I was taking intro to ECE, this year I’m taking intro to MechE. It seems pretty interesting. Really not making my major declaration decision easy though…
The snow in Pittsburgh is very pretty, but it’s gonna be quite cold this week. Lows in the single digits (with windchill in the negatives). As a California kid, I think the novelty of real winter will wear off soon, but at least for now I still find myself playing around with the snow.
I’m sure there’s quite a few people that would let you play around with the snow on their driveways and sidewalks. Provided you clean up after yourself.
