Guido is Bagged and Tagged!

On Tuesday Team 3313 bagged and tagged Guido, ending the 2015 build season! The past couple of days the team has been working on fixing up the robot after Week Zero to make sure that Guido is all set for 10k lakes regional coming up in about a month.

The drive team, Mitch, Brooklyn and Tyler, have been practicing and testing out a couple techniques on how to stack and load the robot during competition. With practicing it also helped the build team see any changes they would have wanted to make.

At around 8 o'clock we took off the grippers and then bagged and tagged Guido, with four hours to spare! Over the next couple of weeks the team is going to be working on the grippers and seeing what we could change to make them grip the totes better and easier without creating such a hassle with trying to grab multiple totes.








But before Guido was all bagged up, Tyler and Bryce bagged themselves and joked around for awhile. Don't worry, no students were harmed in the bagging of the robot.

A Forgetful Week Zero

This past Saturday, Mechatronics went to Week Zero, this event was hosted by Team 2472 and Team 2052 on Valentines Day. We started off the day at 5:30 in the morning with our head coach coming late with the sprinter van we headed out later than we planned. After hooking up the trailer and packing up the two vans, we headed to Circle Pines, MN! 

After driving for about 2 hours, one of our the vans broke down on the side of the highway with only about 10 more miles to go before we would have made it to the event. Luckily  the team traveled in more than one car, so all of us could make it to the event! 

Once at Week Zero, we started to get Guido ready for some practice matches. But before anyone could accomplish anything, the tools and batteries had to be warmed up from sitting in the freezing cold all night. When everything was being unpacked, we realized that our whole drivers station was forgotten! Thanks to Team 3407, Mustybots, and Team 2472, Centurions, they let us borrow a joystick and controller for the event. 

When on the actual field we realized that the autonomous needed to be tweaked to run the intended function. Now fully optimized, the autonomous should be ready to go for the upcoming regional, still adding a little tweaks here and there to make it just right.

With going on the real field instead of just practicing in the workshop, we found some obstacles with picking up the field pieces with our current grippers. So the team brainstormed some new ideas on how to fix the current problem and is testing them the upcoming days before the end of build season. Guido is almost ready to be bagged tomorrow night!

After the event and once Guido was all packed up, we headed to Maple Grove for dinner. Taking some unneeded detours through parking lots. Not the best idea for two vans and a truck with a trailer. Once again while we were heading home after the long day, the same van broke down again after being fixed up during the event!

But looking past the van breaking down twice, forgetting some important items and getting lost a couple times. Week Zero was a fun and eventful day for Team 3313 and we are ready for the 10k regional coming up in April!

Here are some extra photos, one of Guido from the drivers station before autonomous on the same side as the drivers, which is different from the years before! Second, the Valentine buttons that Team 2052 and Team 2472 were handing out during the event, pretty creative sayings they created.

Week 6: The Finishing Touches!

FRC team 3313 Mechatronics has worked throughout the short weeks working on Guido the Robot. It's amazing how something that starts from an idea on a piece of paper can turn into something truly amazing and spectacular!

Looking back, we started by drawing out the ideas that each of us had onto a blackboard. Then from there we worked on melding these ideas together and applying the challenges that the prototype would face. Once we had the ideas together, we revised the final idea and started building right away. Over the next 2 weeks after getting our prototype idea down we started making the frame and wiring board for the robot. Throughout the last few weeks we've added and built onto the robot making sure that the robot was in fit condition to handle the obstacles that were put before it.



"The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new."
  ~Socrates 










Another huge thank you to all of the people who have helped us throughout these short weeks. We can't wait to see what all of the other teams robots look like. Week Zero is coming up this Saturday and i have a feeling that we will have to make some changes on the robot. Don't be afraid of change. New things are good. We can't wait to see the other teams soon!

Guido's Ready for Week Zero!

Yesterday, Mechatronics brought the robot from our workshop to the high school to weigh dear Guido. Transporting the robot only about five miles on the back of a pickup truck in a bag-- while it is snowing, was honestly a bit scary. Weighing the robot was an adventure, one could say. First trying to get the robot through the doors, then losing the key to our truck that we drove over and getting locked out of the school. There was a eventful couple of hours, when it should have only taken about a 30 minutes, if not less.

The total weight of our robot came to 116.6 pounds, only about 4 pounds off from the maximum weight. What a relief to know that we made it in the weight limit, since last year Thor was over 15 pounds above the limit! As well, we had to shed some weight before build season was over. 

The programmers have finished and tested the autonomous so its all ready for Week Zero this upcoming Saturday! Now they are attempting to program in our limit switch, which has become harder than they thought.

Yesterday, the build team was working on fixing anything that might need a little tweaking. Today they built three platform plates on the two sides and back of the robot, on these platforms we will add our team number. Either with stickers or painting them on, haven't heard which one they choose yet.

All while the build team has been building the robot, our PR team has been working on the awards and getting some fundraisers set up in the next couple of months. Last night the main leaders submitted the Entrepreneurship Award, not wanting to miss the due date of today! Now they are working hard on finishing Chairman's; finishing up the video, adding small changes to the executive summary and adding some puns to the essay, here and there.

Week six is coming up and our team is ready to compete at the 10k Regional coming up in April! 

Week Five: Guido the robot!

FRC team 3313 mechatronics has been working all week on chairman's and extra programming that we need to make for the robot. After long consideration we have finally named our robot, Guido, named after the forklift in the movie Cars. 

Guido from the movie Cars (Right)
Our robot Guido (below)

We are anticipating the upcoming day of the week Zero, which will show us the needed tweaks that we need to make for the robot. So far we have had a very productive week and soon we will be done with the chairman's things.

Thank you everyone for your hard work and thank you to all of the people who has helped our team throughout the weeks. Competitions are going to be upon us soon so everyone work as hard as you can and we can't wait to see what all of the other teams have done for Recycle Rush!

Week 4: Programmers Unite!

This week, FRC Team 3313 Mechanics spent hours in our shop testing our robot and fixing every nook and cranny we can find so that we can so that we wont have too many surprises at week Zero. Our lift design has has proven to be quite effective since we fixed the problem in our pistons.

Along with this, our chairman's team has been hard at work on our super hero themed Chairman's essay. Our programmers have been working hard on constructing our autonomous program figuring out every movement our robot must make and the calculations to do so.

We also constructed a safety break system to insure that when we lift the totes and stack them the grippers won't drop them.



Overall this was another great week for the team. We hope that the other teams had a fantastic week and we can't wait until we get to see all the other teams at the competitions!

Chairman's Couch: Week 3

This week, Team 3313 Mechatronics brought new and exciting events. Anything from tweaking our robot to working on chairman's.

During the week our building team worked and tweaked a few things on the robot so that the robot would be able to lift more than one tote at a time.

Our head coach Mr. Rye through the week looked at hotels. He is planning on signing us up for week zero where we can test our robot and improve our robot.

Also, during the week our PR group worked on the Chairman's executive summary, finished up our video outline questions as well as the video itself. This week had been a great week for 3313 Mechatronics and I'm sure it was a great week for the rest of the FIRST community. We look forward to seeing you all at the competitions and seeing how you all tackled this challenge.