Robotics Is Awesome!

The team went up to Parker's Prairie Elementary School to help with their Robotics Week. The title is a quote from an elementary student.

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!

Kinect-ing People

Three big developments today. The new (and hopefully final) electrical board is complete, the mascot head is fully painted black (only touch ups left), and we started programming with the Kinect.

The electrical board was fully completed. We took the final step and made the board out of lexan. The extrusion pieces were brought over to the Tech and cut and tapped. All the cords are plugged in and it is ready to go. The only missing part on the front half of the robot is the metal piece to hold the horn for the bridge down. This piece is being manufactured at the Tech and will be ready tomorrow. Their help has been invaluable to the team this year. Cannot thank them enough. The only build aspects left are finding lexan and making the shooter and gatherer out of it. Other than that, we are basically done with initial design. After that, it's testing, testing, testing and refining, refining, refining.

Colin and Megan started fiddling around with the Kinect. Colin got the program (FAAST) to work last night and showed off today. He could use his hands and arms to guide the mouse on his computer which is sweet. The next step is transferring that information over to LabView (the software we do our programming in). One of the team's big goals is to be well rounded and be able to do as many aspects of the competition as possible. This includes, balancing on the bridge, Kinect driving, autonomous mode, picking up basketballs, shooting basketballs accurately, etc.


The other big development is that the helmet of the mascot is pretty much complete. Jesse and Steph finished spray painting both the helmet and the body today. The next step is adding the other color elements.

I said this yesterday but tomorrow we will drive again!! I promise. We will also get plexiglass and start making the gatherer and shooter final parts. The team will start making the bumpers, keep Kinect programming, and post the team member videos.

The Chains That Bind You

The high school team members did not have school today so the energy level and focus was really good. There was a lot accomplished on the bot and in other areas. There is a new addition to the blog, we got the wheels chained onto the bot, and we are juuuuuust about done with our new electrical board. We also continued work on the mascot and started fiddling around with Kinect driving.

The big advancements on the robot were chaining the wheels and being very close to finishing the electrical board. Damien and Tyler worked hard on finishing the spacers for the wheels. This is a tedious and annoying process but they did a great job finishing it. Bryce then finished the job off by doing the chain. Again, this is a really annoying process but Bryce powered through and finished them up (hopefully for the last time). The biggest annoyance with the chain is how many times we have had to re-do them. I believe we are on our third or fourth chain attempt. However, it was a huge relief having the robot on all six wheels again. The other big advancement was with the new electrical board. Jordan, Allen and Tyler worked on this aspect. We mounted and wired all of the controllers. Jordan cut the extrusion pieces for mounting the top layer. All that's left is bringing those extrusion pieces over to the Tech to get them tapped (we broke our tap set). We will be driving the robot again tomorrow. YES!

Jenna worked on the blog some more. The team would really like to win a Website Award at our Regional competition. There are tons and tons of criteria to do this including a summary of what FIRST Robotics is about and a team summary. Jenna is working on both of these things. The FIRST Robotics summary is up. Click on the page at the top of the blog to check it out. The team summary will be up tomorrow and on Friday we will upload some Team member interviews so you can better get to know the team.

Jesse and Bryce continued painting the mascot body with black spray paint. Mechatron is going to look awesome! Colin, Megan, and Gabe spent some time today organizing the robot room which was SORELY needed. Great work by them. Cleaning and organizing is an important and thankless job. Colin and Megan started fiddling around with the Kinect driving software while they wait to test new code on the robot. Every FIRST team got a Kinect this year which can be used to drive the robot for the first 15 seconds of the match. It will also be cool to use when we are demonstrating the robot out in the community.


 Nice work and focus by the team today. Hopefully, we are all back on track to make the second half of the build season the best it can be. We will have a driving robot again tomorrow. That will be awesome. Thanks for reading! ROLL OUT!

Around the Horn

The biggest excitement for the team today turned out to not really be that exciting after all. The dead line for paying for your second Regional Event (Duluth for us) was Friday but we got it extended to today. We had a bunch of discussions on whether we wanted to go or not. The pros were: more opportunities for advancing to Nationals, another trip to hang out as a team, and another chance to improve the robot before the U of M. The cons were: it costs a lot of money (for individuals and the team), we probably wouldn't be able to bring everyone, it would leave us in a pretty sad state next year and this off season financially, and there would be more school missed. Ultimately we decided against it. The cons really outweighed the pros. We are trying to build something great in our school and community and we want to keep that going rather than take the selfish route and go to Duluth. The U of M is still really awesome and we are doing everything we can during the build season to make a great robot for it.


As far as actual build advancement today, we got quite a bit done. We finished the prototype of the "horn" on the front of the robot. This will allow us to push down the bridge to go to the other side of field or balance on the bridge at the end of the game. Ryan, Tyler, Brandon, and Bydlon worked hard on designing, machining, and mounting the components. Bryce explains in this YouTube video how the mechanism will work. We can't test it quite yet but the concept and execution looks great.

Bryce worked on re-making the electronics board. Our original idea was to have the board vertical connected to the gatherer. Our plans changed last week when we turned the shooter around. So we needed to re-think the board. Our new idea is to mount the electronics in the middle of the bot right in front of the gatherer. We will have two levels of electronics. Bryce made quite a bit of progress. All we have to do is re-mount the components and build the second level. This will be completed tomorrow.

Ryan re-worked the shooter and gatherer connection so the basketball will not get stuck in between. 

Jenna's projects for today included many things. She made a handout about the U of M competition reminding team members we are asking for some monetary contribution to help pay for hotels. She also made some photo collages for new posters (example below). Jenna, Megan, and Colin worked on budgeting out hotels and transportation for the U of M regional. Lots more to do tomorrow.

It was a good day where the team accomplished quite a bit. The sense of accomplishment was back and the energy level was definitely better. Crazy what a day off can do. More excitement tomorrow.

Like A Boss

The title is a quote by Bryce about the gatherer prototype we built. For those who don't know, that quote means "it's awesome."

The beginning of today was spent taking our team picture for the yearbook. Luckily, a lot of the team was there to be in the picture. Most of today was spent doing more brainstorming while we finished the gatherer prototype. The gatherer will be able to pick balls up off the ground and bring them up to some kind of hopper which will then dispense them into our shooter. That's the idea any way... To finish the prototype, we drilled the rest of the holes so we could get the wooden dowels in. We also added a belt to make sure it all worked. There's a video of it up above. The video is also on our YouTube Channel which has a link at the top of this blog.

The brainstorming we were doing while working had a bunch of different tangents.

• How do we get our robot over the 4" bump in the middle of the field? Lots of ideas were thrown out: tank treads, some kind of ramp in front of wheels, bigger wheels, more wheels, hovercraft (just kidding).
• What kind of shooter to use? Spring catapult, pneumatic catapult, one wheel shooter. 
• What should the hopper look like? Vertical, ramp, do we need one.
• Do we need a gate in front of the gatherer? What should that look like?

While we didn't come up with many answers, just talking through the problems and throwing out ideas is an invaluable experience. Luckily, Bryce's brother-in-law, Jimmy was able to help us out today. Chandler, a student from Alex Tech, also came over to help. It is great to have their expertise available to the team.

Tyler started working on making the schematics for a trial bump and bridge to test our future robot on.

The PR team worked on getting the Echo Press article all set up. They also sent an email to the PMMC (one of our major sponsors, check our sponsors page!) thanking them again for their support and updating them on our progress. The big PR development is that we are going to get our t-shirts ordered. They are going to look so awesome!!! There is a big surprise for the shirts which is going to be amazing. The team is super pumped.

In general, the team is having a little bit of growing pains. There are more students than in the past which is a GREAT thing. It just makes getting organized and keeping everyone on task a little more difficult. Not impossible, just more difficult. This will come together though. Overall, yet another great day with lots of progress. We already have some good plans for tomorrow. We'll leave you with this picture of Bryce and Bydlon.

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.