Preparing For the Onslaught

The major theme of this past week was preparing for the Kick-Off event along with preparing ourselves and the robot room for the most awesome, crazy, stressful, rewarding 6 weeks of the school year (the build season).

On Wednesday, the team split up into sub teams. Everyone went to the media center and watched videos pertaining to their area (Publicity, Electrical, Mechanical, and Programming). The videos are Webinars from the MN FIRST Robotics Splash event. The event is put on by some of the more veteran teams in MN. Those teams presented extremely valuable information on all aspects of the FIRST experience and then posted the videos of their presentations on the MN FIRST website. Each of the sub-teams learned a lot and had some really good discussions. The collaboration within the sub teams was surprising (and awesome) since they had just formed. While that was going on, Jenna emailed all of the PMMC suppliers to try and get more funding.

Thursday and Friday were spent working on a bunch of different areas.

• The mechanical and electrical teams spent it working on disassembling the drive train and electrical board. We did not have any information on what this season's game was going to be so we wanted a fresh start. Also, we are going to make major changes to both systems. The electrical board is going to be completely redone. We ordered Victor motor controllers to replace our more unreliable Jaguar controllers.The Robot Room was also organized (for the umpteenth time) in preparation for Kick-Off.
• While that was going on, the programming team started working on taking apart the drive station so we can accommodate more joy sticks and switches. They also discussed ideas on how each person was going to work on the programming during the season.
• The publicity/public relations team worked on two big projects. They got the ball running on creating t-shirts. They went to Cowing Robards and presented our designs (THEY ARE GOING TO BE SO SWEET). We will know the final designs and order the shirts next week. When we get the final designs, they will be posted. Their other big project was organizing our trip down for the Kick-Off on Saturday. We had some travel arrangement snafus. Also, every team member had to bring paperwork so that is always a hassle to get together. The team did a great job adjusting on the fly.

KICK-OFF IS TOMORROW!!!! This is the equivalent to Christmas Eve for FIRST Robotics Teams.