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Just a few of the team members came today but actually led to quite a bit being accomplished. It was a good day.

First of all, Murphy programming upgrades occurred today. Alicia mounted the green LED light we bought and wired it up. Allen and Dalton, green LED light installed, finished the vision processing programming. They have it so, after pressing a button, Murphy automatically centers itself on a basketball hoop. IT IS SO COOL! Pretty great work by those two. There are still a few kinks to work out but overall, it will be really helpful during matches to not worry about that. The other programming upgrade is that we added autonomous. Funny moment: someone suggested we should add it in, Allen goes "Give me a minute". Literally a minute later, we had autonomous. Incredible. AND IT WORKS! WOOO!

Kacy and Miranda got to work on our Public Relations workshop for the Minne-Regional on Saturday. We volunteered ourselves to host a workshop on dealing with the public. It is a big deal for our team to get our name out there among other FRC teams as a major player. Over the weekend, Kacy and Bydlon worked on a general outline for the workshop. Today, Kacy worked on turning the outline into a slide show. Miranda worked on a booklet to hand out to teams when they attend the workshop. Both of them worked really hard. Carson also contributed by finishing our coloring book idea from last year. Each team in attendance will receive a "Mechatronics Coloring Book" as well. Should be a fun half hour or so!! (That's the plan anyway).

Bryce worked on numerous projects. Dalton, Bydlon, and Bryce got the robot weighed at UPS. It's only 110 lbs! WOOO! After adding pneumatics, we were all a little concerned about it being overweight. Luckily, it's not. Bryce also worked on getting extraneous pieces off of Murphy and switching some stuff around so it is optimized.

Kacy fixed some of the broken or beat up pieces on Mechatron, our mascot. After going to Chicago, Massman, lunches, and many other public appearances, it can look a little worse for wear. Kacy and the others have done a great job of keeping it looking great.

The rest of the day was spent by Bryce and Alicia practicing picking up balls and shooting baskets.

Tomorrow is another full team meeting. Lots more to accomplish!

Many Hands For Lots Of Work

In all honesty, after presenting to the 9th graders yesterday, we expected to have maybe 2 or 3 show up today or in the future. It's a big time commitment and kind of scary to show up to a new thing. Boy, were we wrong. We had 6 show up!! WOAH! That's great! We needed all the help too. Soooo much going today.

The two main priorities for today for the Build Team were getting Murphy driving again and shooting a basketball. Both of these items were possible because we received our new parts from AndyMark (the main robot part distributor). With all of the people hanging out, the work went pretty fast and we got A TON accomplished. It was kind of incredible to watch actually.

The work started with Brandon and Tyler tackling the gearboxes for the drive train. Let's be honest, gearboxes are not the most fun thing to deal with. They require a lot of precision, the parts are really small and have to be put together in a very specific order. However, Brandon and Tyler got them put together and mounted on the robot in a pretty short amount of time. Unfortunately, we had a bunch of other stuff we were working on so we couldn't test the drive train right away.

The other big goal of the Build Team was to shoot a basketball. We wanted to switch out a CIM motor on the shooter for some smaller motors so we could use that CIM in our drive train. Luckily, mounting the new small motors was not that much of a problem. First, Bryce marked the new mounting holes on the wheel mount. Molly brought it over to Alex Tech and got them machined out. Then Bryce mounted the gear box and put it on the robot.

Another thing we are working on for Build Team was mounting the pneumatics components. Pneumatics is using air pressure to move pistons. Demian and David worked on mounting the compressor. It was a process because we had to get mounts made, then putting the mounts on and everything was a paint in the butt. Lots of putting things together and then taking them apart. But that's ok! It looks great and is extremely stable.

Programming team spent a lot of time today just kind of waiting for those upgrades to get finished. Once Murphy was up and driving, there was some time spent debugging and working on different small projects. Like getting the SMART Dashboard up and running and working on the semi-autonomous.

Carson spent pretty much all of today working on a poster for the Massman Open House. One of our awesome sponsors, Massman, is a packaging machine manufacturer. They are opening up their shop to the public on October 23 and we will be a part of it. We will have our robots out and showing them off both to Massman employees and the public.

Kacy had driver's training so she showed up late but still got a lot done. She emailed out our Elden's Grocery Bagging Poster. She also started an email for our Kick-Off workshops. This is a brand new experience for the team so we want the organization to go well at the beginning.

Jesse and some of the other team members made some fixes to the mascot. After all of our public appearances recently, Mechatron was a little worse for wear. Jesse and the others also started coming up with some ideas for how to remake the legs of Mechatron.

Taylor worked on cleaning up more of the Robot Room. With all the activities we have been up to, it got a little messy. That is definitely a goal to have for the year: keep the Robot Room clean and organized more.

Gabe showed up a little bit later. He partnered up with Jesse and started talking and working on some more Chairman's Award activities. They discussed a general layout for the video and some ideas about how to start shooting. They also watched some more examples on YouTube.

After getting everything put together, we tested out driving Murphy and shooting basketballs. It all worked!!! Yay! It was really fun to see Murphy moving around and picking up basketballs again. So proud of all the work and upgrades we have done so far.

There was crazy energy today because of all the newbies and pretty much everyone being in attendance. It was AWESOME!

After working so hard, some of the team members used a 12 sided die to decide where to eat dinner. THen played Rock Band for a while. What a great day.

All Of The Lights

The team met on a Wednesday today which was a slightly different routine than the past few weeks. The energy was really great from everyone as we met in Bydlon's room right after school. The team discussed upcoming important dates and the activities we would be working on.

The build team mostly worked on Murphy's electrical set up. The Victor stands and most of the big components had already been put down. The main thing left was wiring it all up. Alicia and Miranda were a huge help in this regard. Alicia did almost all of the wiring herself (with help from Bryce and Bydlon). The tricky parts were WAY less tricky with all of the room we allowed ourselves. It was no nice to be able to see where we were putting wires and keep all organized from the beginning. All of the victors spinning with their wire tags was pretty cool. The whole system looks great. The team decided to have the conveyor lights stay blue and the logo lights stay red. It looks awesome together!

Other work in the shop included Brandon with pneumatics, Molly gets some parts made over at Alex Tech, and the programmers doing their thing. Brandon continued tinkering and thinking about pneumatics. He worked on some formulas and math to figure out where to place pistons for a potential bridge lowerer. Molly, Demian, and Miranda ran over to Alex Tech to get some parts made for the battery holder at the front of the robot. It works exactly as we envisioned. The programmers (Dan, Luke, Dalton, and Allen) continued to messing with vision processing. They got the computer to pick up a red rectangle once which was exciting!

Up in the computer lab, Gabe started typing up little paragraphs about each team member. This will be better and easier than the team member video interviews we did last year. Also, if there are team member shake-ups, these are incredibly easy to replace, add to, and change. Carson worked on creating a poster for out Grocery Bagging Fundraiser on Saturday, October 20. It looks fantastic! Kacy wrote a few emails to ninth grade teachers asking if we could come into their class and present. She also got a lesson on how to use this website.

Overall, it was a great day for the team. Seeing Murphy glowing again (if only for a little bit) was a promising and reassuring sight. We are making great strides forward and meet again tomorrow!

Nothing Ever Goes As Planned

Today was one of the busiest days that Team 3313 has ever had. We had the local TV station come in and video tape us, we performed a halftime show for the public, and we packed up for a competition (until 12:30am). All this after being at school working until about 11:30pm on Thursday night.

Final Push

Today was the FINAL PUSH before a lot of really exciting things happen this weekend:

• We are going to be visited by the local TV station tomorrow morning. 
• We are performing as the halftime show of the girls bball game tomorrow night. 
• We are going to a scrimmage on Saturday at Eagan High School. 
• Lastly, the robot has to be boxed up next Tuesday. 

SO! There were a lot of things to do today!

Conveying Our Excitement!

 WE GOT SO MUCH DONE TODAY! The day off on Sunday seemed to really invigorate the team. That or the fact that we only have one week left to finish...

 

Ride The Roller Coaster

Tons of excitement today! The biggest development of the day is that OUR ROBOT WORKS AGAIN! YES! We also got our new shirts in! They look sweet! We have a new drive station laptop! We got more pulleys in so the whole bottom level of the conveyer works! Exclamation points!

Golden Horn

A full day of robotics for some of the team members. They had a PMMC meeting, then robotics after school. After school, we worked on tricking out the gatherer, making a new horn, working on the mascot's feet, and the pulleys for the gatherer.

Ghost Robot

The robot is really coming together now! We got all the Lexan we need and constructed the shooter and conveyer out of the Lexan. We also made a new blog page, kept working on programming the servo, and started on the mascot feet.

One of the team's big season goals was to build a robot that not only functioned well, but also looks pretty sweet. To that end, Bryce wired in LEDs to the electrical board today. Our bot now glows blue or red at the flip of a switch! Bydlon and Brandon got the last pieces of Lexan we needed for the conveyer. With those pieces bought, Ryan went to work putting the conveyer together. We are using big aluminum extrusion as reinforcement instead of c-channel because the Lexan is less rigid than chipboard or plywood. Ryan did an AWESOME job and it looks great. Meanwhile, Tyler went to work tidying up the shooter. We put all the pieces together and just have to mount the wheel and motor to the case. The team spent some time discussing how we are going to decorate all the Lexan we are using (sponsors, logos, colors, etc.). The goal is get everything put together by Thursday. A lofty goal but Team 3313 has come through in the clutch before.

Jenna finished compiling all of the team member interviews into sub team compilations. Be sure to check them out on the new tab at the top of the page or click here, Team Members. Great work by her. The Queen songs at the beginning of each are an homage to our constant Queen playlist in the shop (and love of Queen in Rock Band). The team's constant recruitment push is still going on (we had a new potential member hang out with Jenna today).

Megan and Colin kept working on programming in the servo motor to drop the bridge arm. This is being a real pain because no one on the team has ever programmed one before. Lots of research has yielded nothing so far.

Jesse, Spencer, and some other members started working on the feet of the mascot. The base of the feet is carpet and cardboard with shoes screwed into this. Then you build the cardboard around this. Lots of problem solving to figure out how to do this.Gabe took some great pictures today as well.

Another awesome day of build season. It is so fantastic seeing all of the robot pieces come together to form our finished project. It's slow going because we need to be really precise and make sure it all works. ONLY 15 DAYS LEFT!

Blast From The Past

As usual after such an awesome and amazing couple of days where we accomplished SO MUCH, today was a little bit of a thinking and figuring out what to do next sort of day. That doesn't mean we did not accomplish anything, just means we were a little more sluggish and a little less focused. The big accomplishment for today was that we made an angle adjuster mechanism for the shooter. We also continued work on the mascot.

When playing the game at the competition, we want to be able to shoot from different places on the field. To facilitate this, we wanted to adjust the angle of the shooter so we could shoot lower or higher depending on where we are and our battery life and many other factors. This post is titled this way because we ended up using one of the big components from last year: a lead screw and window motor. Last year, two lead screws and two window motors powered our scissor lift. This year, they are powering our angle adjuster. Tyler, Brandon, Bydlon, and Bryce worked on this mechanism. It works great. Colin almost finished the programming for it but had to leave. This will be totally operational tomorrow.

The other big build project was that we wanted to have a sweeper in front of the gatherer. Ryan worked hard on getting it all together. Unfortunately, when we got it all wired up, it kept blowing out fuses and the surgical tubing kept getting stuck in the conveyer belt. So, we decided to keep the sweeper off.

The big electrical project was wiring up the LED's for the driver station. We have a toggle switch so the driver station can light up red or blue depending on which alliance we are assigned.  Bryce and Demian worked on this aspect. The driver station is now complete.

Steph, Jesse, and Gabe kept working on the mascot. They finished the head yesterday and have moved on to the body. Making the dimensions right is a hard task. There are no measurements in what we found online about the mascot so they are basically guessing and checking as they go. This makes work slow. They are plowing ahead though.

Tomorrow will be a better day for work. We will be more rested and more focused. We will have a full team meeting, finish the angle adjuster, and our big goal is to start working on our "tusk" idea for bringing the bridge down. Thanks for reading. Go team 3313!