Week 5 Status Update: Robot, Assemble!

All of the parts are made, and our build team has been hard at work this week assembling the robot! They've had to spend some very long nights in the workshop to make up for the snow days we've had, but it's all been worth it. We're on track for the robot to be completely finalized within the week. Then drive practice can start!

Programming team has made great progress in getting the robot to align to a target!

The bumpers are coming along, too! Building bumpers is a great thing for new members to help with, since it requires measuring and building on a smaller scale than the robot itself, and it is still a very important component of the robot.

Next week will likely be focused on drive practice, so keep an eye out on our social media accounts for updates! We're so close to the end of this build season, and it's been one of the most productive for us ever!

Week 4 Status Update: Build Team Mega Update

Build team has made tremendous progress over the course of the first three weeks of build season! We have the whole robot either on order, or in-house waiting to be machined or assembled. The computer aided design has been finalized and is only changing due to some extra holes here and there. With the help of contributions from our sponsors over the past few years, we have been able to expose members of our team to emerging manufacturing technologies using machines in our schools woodshop. Every year we can proudly say that our robot was made with parts machined by students, with the guiding eye of our beloved mentors, in our own school. This year all of our subassemblies, excluding our drive train, will be created from machined materials in our shop!

We have had a working drive base since the first week of build thanks to an early order and assembly by some of the newest members of our team. This has allowed programming to work consistently throughout the season to fine tune movement and vision processing. They're almost there in terms of getting the robot to align to a target! As build team moves into the last three weeks, we will slowly attach subassemblies to the base and let programming fiddle with controls until we have a smooth riding machine. The effect of snow days have been detrimental to the overall progress of build but we hope to catch up with some late nights and long weekends in the shop.

We should have a working robot completed by Week 5 and a reveal video of our creation in the following weeks. Stay tuned! You don't want to miss it!

Week 3 Status Update: Machining, Testing, & Refining

This week consisted of a lot of little odds and ends, which isn't always the most glamorous part of FIRST, but is necessary nonetheless! Proper prior planning prevents poor performance!

For our build team, this week was all about finalizing the robot design, machining parts, and testing prototypes. We take pride in the fact that so many of the parts on our robots are machined by us in our high school's workshop. In the 2016 season, we had many issued with parts we ordered and that were being machined elsewhere. Since then, we have made an effort to make as many parts as possible in-house ourselves. We think the extra work really pays off in terms of time efficiency, and it make our robots that much more personal to us.

Our programming team has continued to refine the vision algorithm for the robot. They're working with a Jevois camera, and have begun to learn Open CV, which is a Python library for image processing. They're making very good progress!

About halfway through build season, we're proud of the progress we've made! We're also planning on releasing a special video on our YouTube channel soon, so keep an eye out for that in the coming week!