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Week 3, recap. Alpha bot was completed in record time (2.5 weeks to build and 1.5 days to program, unheard of at Team Paradox!). We also had a design review and looked at solutions to current problems we’re facing as well as possible issues we may come across in the future. We finalized details of our first climber design, and purchased necessary parts for building version 2. We started renovating our battery cart to make it more efficient and prolong battery life, made designs for a new robot cart, as well as built a new cart for our pit structure. Programmers made auto paths, further developed auto game piece tracking, and coded our alpha bot which is now drive practice ready. The outreach team had a break week and just had Stem2Leaf, a monthly event where we work with elementary and middle school students and spread important STEM principles. The operations branch interviewed fellow team members on their experiences with our nominee (WOOHOO!!) Stimson and the first full draft for the Woodie Flowers Award is almost finished. The FIRST Impact Award essay is also coming together, and filming the optional video to accompany the essay may begin soon. Marketing continued organizing and assembling our new cheer team and continued working on their many projects (see Week 2). To top things off, we had a very successful club fair and brought in some new recruits! That is all for Week 3, be sure to check in next week!!
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This past week, our engineers have worked hard to put the intake together and have almost finished wiring our swerve chassis. On both Saturday and Sunday, we had drive practice in which our drive team practiced with our newly prototyped intake that we attached to our off-season robot, Phoenix. Programming continued to come up with new autonomous paths and successfully got some of them to run according to plan. The operations branch interviewed this year’s candidate for the Woodie Flowers Award (go Stimson!!), transcribed the entire conversation, and began to write the first draft of the essay. Outreach discussed future elementary/middle school tours since we want to reach out to the younger kids and hopefully interest them so they may join robotics later when they reach highschool. As for marketing, we received a new shipment of t-shirts and sweaters that we will soon be printing for our mentors and parents. Designs for new sponsor banners, informational banners, pins, and for the Evidence Binder (a binder storing everything our team has done in the past years to refer to when judge-talking) have been in the works. We also started to look more into redesigning our pit to create more space for judge-talkers since it is always very cramped in the tight area. Week 2 is over, heading on to Week 3!!
Whew, first week of Build Season, complete. Before the recap, big shout out to the parents and mentors who assembled many of the field elements for us, thank you all so much!! We really appreciate all your hard work. Over the past seven days, we’ve developed robot concepts, started designing them, and modeled these ideas on Onshape. We prototyped with rollers to make a horizontal intake, started assembling the intake, began to put together a multifunctional telescoping arm, tested out a promising shooting strategy, and devised layouts and a new wiring set-up for the robot. Programmers attempted to get autonomous paths to work and made progress on the AI game-piece tracking project. The operations team, after brainstorming ideas and analyzing previous essays, began to work on a rough outline for the Woodie Flowers Award and the FIRST Impact Award. In marketing, we made new cheers, discussed the cheer team logistics, and created timelines for upcoming events as well as contacted those lending their artistic abilities to help design our banners and booklets. Anyway, that’s all for this week and keep your eyes out for our video recap!
Kickoff is here! Which means that it’s time for late nights in the shop (or cold basement if you’re a programmer) and fun dinners with the team! We split our kickoff into two days and here’s how it went: Day One: Early Saturday morning, we stream into our school’s cafeteria with the Wild Raccoon where kickoff is taking place for us. Everyone is tired but excited as we sit down and watch the game animation. This year’s game is called Crescendo, and the objective is to shoot rings (called notes) into "amps" and "speakers" and to climb on stage (chains) at the end of the game. Maybe if you’re feeling ambitious you can try to place a note into the trap (which in our opinion is definitely a trap). After watching the animation, we split into groups and studied the game manuals and rules in depth. We also brainstormed various strategies and each group presented what they came up with. Day Two: We did a quick review of the rules and then split into groups again. Each group spent an hour in each branch (engineering, outreach/marketing, and operations) to discuss that specific branch’s goals for the year. In engineering, we learned about the importance of scouting, what it is and how we do it. Then we head into the metal shop to prototype. We had a lot of fun watching our ideas come to life through the prototypes. In Outreach/Marketing, we looked into how we can improve our pit layout and sketched out ideas (last season our pit crew was sitting on the dusty floor *insert sobbing emoji*). In Operations, we discussed judge-talking and talked about awards, focusing on the FIRST Impact Award and Woodie Flowers Award. And that’s about it. There we go, kickoff with Team Paradox is complete. Happy Build Season everyone (we’ll be posting these blogs once a week so be on the lookout!)!!
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