We are doing some new things this year and doing an over the summer project of a T-shirt cannon:) .
Is your team doing a summer project this year, if so what are you doing?
My summer project is running 58 summer robotics camps for 3rd to 8th grade students all over Minnesota. Should keep me pretty busy…
Chain in tube is something we want to play with a good amount before using it during the season. We also might look into putting the wheels on the inside of drive rails.
I would like to take my kids with me on my volunteering roboting adventures and train them up to serve FIRSTs needs as well!
Swerve + chain in tube WCD with no tensioning.
Trying my best to not check CD.
I am hoping we can build an offseason robot of some sort to help train people. Hopefully it could either be used at offseason events for Power Up, or just as an interesting demo robot that is a bit more accessible/relatable for public audiences (nobody cares about milk crates!)
That ain’t happening
Y’all got any more of them volunteering opportunities?
My personal goal is to learn CAD, since thats an area that we will be lacking in a little bit next year. As a team we will be helping out with a summer camp in another state, where we will be helping teach how to build bots.
My team and I want to build and learn the art of West Coast Drive. Were all very excited, and cant wait to have a standardized drive train design.
Teaching CAD to the mechanical monkeys and motion profiling for the programmers. I’m looking into writing a custom MP implementation over the summer as my first serious coding project. it will be fun (and hard).
Find a permanent build space :yikes:
Besides that, it would be nice to try a chain in tune WCD, messing around with custom gearboxes (775s) and working on making things light weight.
My personal goal is to better understand LabView and play with some vision and maybe mess around with some motion profiling. We shall see!
Swerve + Good Auto
We are actually doing quite a few to keep the momentum going and kids learning skills.
The programming team made up a game (using a basic chassis going around the switch) for everyone to try which they started tonight and so far it was fun to see the non-programmers having fun with it.
One of our mechanical mentors made up an intake challenge with the basketballs from 2012. Students have to design and make a prototype to complete the challenge.
Re-doing our 2014 robot to be shorter and shoot the lightweight giant vinyl balls for demo purposes. (instead of that heavy FIRST yoga ball that could take a poor little kid out if they tried to catch it!)
Building a t-shirt/squishy ball cannon bot.
And refreshing 2016 & 2017 with a few upgrades to make sure they are demo ready.
We had a lot of new (and younger) team members this year so having all these little projects along with off season events and then our required “deliverables” in the fall after new recruits come in, hopefully will put us in a good position skill wise by January!
Swerve drive.
And cleaning up/organizing the shop (says the mom part of me…)
We’ve had an air cannon from our first year. It’s changed a lot over the years, but has always been built on the same 31" nanotube chassis. This summer we’re moving up to a gasoline-powered golf cart to better do parades.
We’re also doing some serious mods to our competition robot (making it MUCH smaller), and some classes, including CAD.
Two things.
1st: Designing a smaller bot for switch and vault for off season comp. along side it designing a custom drive train, as our team had been using the AndyMark drive train ever since we started as a team.
2nd: bringing this year’s bot to the scout camp I work at during the summer to help teach the robotics merit badge and to teach about FIRST.
I am personally thinking of doing motion profiling, lidar, better vision system, a wider use of sensors such as gyros and encoders, and maybe even neural networks if I get around to it. The goal is to become one of the best at software in MN as next year is the last as a student for my team.
Start a couple FLL teams to feed our FTC teams. Create a group image for all the FLL and FTC teams that lead up to our FRC team. Move to electronic scouting instead of paper scouting, and along with that, purchase scouting tablets and new laptops. Not really an off-season project, but I am personally trying to learn CAD.