Well it seems that our previous issue never sent out, so sorry for the late update. Issue #3 will be out soon.
Well, stuff happened.
Snow is a rare occasion in Texas. It happened to be that we had the rarest snowstorm of all time this year. Everything shut down, and everyone was looking outside at the winter wonderland that trapped them inside.
People were without power for days, while some had rolling power outages. During a time of uncertainty, things took a turn for the worse. However, it’s Sunday, and we’re slowly building everything back up. School was off for a week, so that was fun. One exception: we didn’t have any access to the robot.
Before the snow
Judging
The weekend before the storm hit, we competed in the Peace, Love, and Robots Scrimmage. It was a great chance for our team to get to understand how the virtual competitions would work, and give practice to the rookies on our team.
And for our first judging as a team, it went pretty well. Starting off, we were pretty rough, forgetting what we were saying, and letting our nerves get the best of us. However, as we continued the flow, we got better and ended the interview pretty good.
In fact, we ended up winning the Motivate Award, and placed runner-up for the Think Award. Not bad for a primarily rookie team. All the teams that competed did an awesome job, so congrats!
Afterwards, we talked about our pros and cons of the interview, and where we should improve upon, coming with a few takeaways:
If you forget something, skip it and go to the next person. If you remember it, find a way to plug it in.
Focus on speaking briefly about the essentials of the robot, and don’t keep it overly technical; judges come from all types of backgrounds and perspectives
Practice the sample questions provided by FIRST, as everyone should be able to answer these
These takeaways gave us places to improve upon before our next interview.
Build
After judging, we finally finished mounting our shooter onto the robot. We planned to spend the next few weekdays working on refining the mount, as well as programming both the TeleOp and Autons for our matches which were due by the Friday.
But over the weekend, it started to snow.
During the snow
The snow threw our entire plans out the window. Everything we had planned had to be changed and redeveloped. So that’s what we spent the week doing.
Communication over the week was hard, with over half the team without sufficient power or WiFi. It was challenging for even two people to discuss their plans, let alone the entire group.
However, it didn’t stop those who were online to work together and come up with a gameplan.
Kiyan and Nitin focused on working out all of the kinks and problems in CAD, seeing how we can simplify mechanisms and develop efficient strategies for both TeleOp and Auton.
Irving and Rajit worked on creating Road Runner trajectories, making sure of the paths our robot could take, all while performing accurately.
Atharv and Ian were planning out a few minor adjustments to our odometry pods, to make them more sturdy, as they were getting a bit loose.
Michael, Jason, and Ritesh focused on the notebook and portfolio, refining portions that weren’t too great, and adding the work we have done.
All of this was done to ensure that the day we got back to the lab, we could get the adjustments for the robot done.
After the snow
And once the snow melted, a few of us met up at the lab to get the planned fixes completed.
We were able to make our odometry adjustments, which helped with the localization of our robot. We also almost finished our passthrough mechanism, hoping to finalize it over the week.
And finally, we were able to test out our shooter for the first time, near the end of our meeting. We used two MATRIX 12V motors on wheels to compress the rings and shoot them. With our first test, we noticed a few things;
The motors take a little bit to reach maximum velocity, and increase as more rings are shot
The motors get hot when running
The battery has major fluctuations when running the motors
We didn’t have time to fix the issues, but having them addressed help with our planned fixes. At the time of this writing, we were notified that there was a problem with the motor, so we need to ship it back. We don’t fully know if this would fix the rest of the issues, but we will look into it.
That’s all folks!
The snowstorm not only messed up our plans, but it created serious harm to millions of Texans, without heat, power, or even water. We hope that now without snow, we will be able to go back to the norm, which still isn’t even a norm.
Once again, thanks for reading. If you have any questions, feel free to comment down below or shoot us an email.