Week One has Come to a Close

The first full week of build season is over now, with only five left. As of today, we have established our robot design with a great flourish! And, of course, a bit of disagreeing. But that, my friends, is what learning is all about. Over the past week, we have learned new skills to better understand the world around us. We have learned critical thinking skills that we will take for the rest of our life. We have learned the greatness of compromise . . . and the greatness of failed calculations.

Fun fact! Our robot was featured in the 2015 FIRST Robots *Behind the Design, written by Vince Wilczynski and Stephani Slezycki. Our robot was included for our CAD work. For those that don’t know, CAD stands for Computer Aided Design. We were featured in the same book with other teams such as 1114, who was on the final field last year at champs, and 118, who is a legacy team and won the entire Championships competition last year.

Now, back to this year, our field is almost done, and we’re just missing the springs and the paint. And the 500 pounds of ballast to let robots hang off of the towers! Our mentors and parents have worked their butts off to get this done as soon as possible, and we’re extremely grateful. With the field almost done, we can focus on our robot more than ever.

For where we stand now, we have a front intake with rollers. The ball will sit inside a small bucket, which is slightly larger than the ball. For our drive base, we have settled upon wheels. Members on the team put together a spread sheet of tank drive versus our standard wheel drive, and the benefits on the wheel drive outweighed the advantages of the tank drive. The most and foremost decision was our knowledge on the subjects. We have built wheel drives before, but we have never attempted the tank drive before.

Also, we have settled on a breacher-climber bot. Our goal will to be the best breacher bot FIRST will ever see, and to climb 100% of the tower, 100% of the time. What’s a breacher bot? Our drive base will conquer all of the outer works! And we are designing an intake/outtake system that will never falter! Can you tell that we’re excited?

As always, we are excited to get into the heat of build season, when design is all but over and fabrication has finally started and has gone into full swing. From now on, when you walk into the technology wing of our high school, all you will smell is oil, sawdust, and slightly burnt popcorn (because even high school engineers need snacks!).

1511 wishes you good luck on the second week of build season, and in the spirit of medieval time travel, may your drive bases drive flawlessly, your scalers always attach, and your engineers always bright and excited!