Team News

Boston Regional

March 24, 2012 | By Emily

by Emily O.
Having left school just before it ended on Wednesday, the students of Miss Daisy were ready to start their long journey to Boston. Our six hour bus ride to our hotel went off without a hitch, watching many movies on the way and getting a break for dinner on the way; nevertheless, we did surprise a few people when we asked what state we were in while eating at a convenient Subway. When we got into Boston on Wednesday night, we had a quick team meeting and then hung out in the hotel.

2012 Boston Regional The next day, we had a time-consuming job to do in the one day we were allotted before qualification matches. After seeing the effectiveness of other teams (such as 1218) with a “stinger,” the team decided that we wanted to try our hand at adding this modification to our robot. This addition took all morning to add and it was necessary to cut off the ends of bolts to subtract some weight, but eventually the change was finished with still enough time for many practice matches. In these matches we tried out our stinger as well as two new human players as our main human player was unable to attend the regional. We finished the day inspected and confident in our robot.

2012 Boston Regional Friday included many wins on the field in addition to a few defeats. Our drivers performed wonderfully as the entire team cheered them on. In addition to adding to our accolades on the field, a few students decided to help out the regional. Miss Daisy students volunteered to man the safety glasses table when the regional did not have enough volunteers. Many students sat at that table for hours cleaning glasses and making sure that everyone who wanted to enter the pit had glasses.

Saturday was incredible. Qualification matches seemed to speed by and we eventually ended up as the first seed. We sent our scouting leader out to pick our alliance partners and were extremely pleased to be paired with teams 233 and 246. As the day continued, the team’s spirit skyrocketed as our robot plunged into the finals and eventually became a champion of the Boston Regional. We were extremely thrilled to receive the Industrial Design Award and also won the Industrial Safety Award. Our team is thrilled with our success as well as the connections we made with teams in the Boston area. We love traveling to other areas of the country in order to meet new teams and have fun. The next competition for Miss Daisy is the MAR Championship. Here we come!

Chestnut Hill District Competition

March 13, 2012 | By Emily

by Willow B.

2012 CHA District If possible, the Week 2 competition at Chestnut Hill was even more exciting and exhilarating than our competition last week. Chestnut Hill was intense for the entire team from the moment we got there. Things really got interesting when we lost our second match because a motor lead detached; then it really was game time.We spent the rest of the day battling our way back to the top from nineteenth. Daisy performed fantastically, and after winning every other match that day, we were thrilled to leave in first place.

2012 CHA District Day two was equally exciting; we only lost one other match when our camera failed, but it was enough to ensure that all daisies were clinging to the edges of our seats. With the hard work of everyone in scouting, in the pits, on the field, and in the stands, we claimed the top spot, and selected 1218 and 2559 as our alliance partners. We won all of our matches in the elimination rounds, and went on to win our second blue banner of the season. Along with this, we won the Website and Gracious Professionalism awards. We not only made our grandmothers proud; we made the entire team and school district proud. We are absolutely delighted with the outcome of the first two events, and are now looking forward to our next competition at the Boston Regional.

Hatboro-Horsham District Competition

March 6, 2012 | By Emily

by David C.
The Hatboro-Horsham Week 1 competition was a blast! Miss Daisy could not have performed anymore past our expectations, and the feeling of competition was nostalgic to our veterans and exhilarating to our rookies. Day one of the competition left the entire team in high spirits, as Daisy claimed the number one spot after winning all of her matches for the day. The team was very busy working in the pits, on the field, as well as going around to other teams and scouting.

On the second day, we selected second-seeded team number 1218 and team number 1640 as our alliance partners going into the elimination rounds. Two burned-out motors later, our alliance went on to win all of our matches to win the blue banner, and the team also received the Industrial Design Award. With Hatboro-Horsham behind us, we’re looking forward to more success at Chestnut Hill this week!

2012 Build Season: Week 6

February 19, 2012 | By Kirsten

Design & Build by David C.
Tuesday – The build team continued to pursue our new last-minute design change. Looking at last week’s post, it does not seem too specific, so I will fill in the spaces just a bit more. The new design is meant to resolve the issue of the foam basketballs climbing over each other and sticking to one another in the robot. Rather than having everything situated in the tower, we plan to have a hopper on the back of the robot that will freely hold the three balls we collect; they will stay there until we are ready to feed them one at a time into the tower. The claw has been redesigned so it can pick up balls more efficiently, but it is still undergoing revisions. Things are looking very well so far.

Thursday – Thursday’s build night left the team in high spirits, as Daisy was brought out for the first full test. The shooter was quite consistent and the drive system was performing up to expectations compared to a previous driving test. In the shop, the robot underwent several motor swaps, the claw has yet to be fully attached to the robot, and the shooter needs fine tuning. Aside from a few loose PWM’s and exchanged parts, Miss Daisy is looking fine.

Friday – Back in the shop, Daisy is still going through some tweaking and reassessment. The shooter needs to be adjusted slightly in order to prevent unexpected curveballing, and the claw is getting close to being attached to the robot. In addition, we began taking the dimensions for bumpers from the CAD team. On the side, Team #341 is working on our mobile museum project. Our team received a grant from Dow Chemical Company, and we are currently putting together a mobile learning center for community demonstrations. The museum includes several small robots and a field in order to show how cool robotics can be, specifically targeting the younger generation. We’ll also have displays and computer-aided learning stations where people can learn more about robotics holistically, as well as aspects such as pneumatics, electrical boards, and the design processes.

Saturday – Saturday began with more finalization of the robot. The claw design was finished and the claw was attached to the bot.We are very satisfied with its performance. All that remains is the hopper, or “armor” as some coaches call it (it seriously looks like armor; it’s pretty awesome). This will be our way of handling the balls during the tele-op period although a few kinks need to be worked out. Another round of testing was conducted at the end of the day, and Daisy seems to be moving smoothly and shooting consistently. Miss Daisy 2012 is almost complete, and it’s just about game time!

CADby David S.
Although the official FIRST Build Season period of six weeks is over, the CAD Team is still hard at work finishing up final robot touches to perfect the model. This week, we have finalized models for all sub parts in the robot, created some last-minute parts to be added onto the robot, and added some final assemblies that were not created earlier. But before the robot was bagged and tagged, the team took pictures of various parts of the robot in varying levels of detail. This allows us to observe the robot and identify parts or systems that are left to be created and create them, albeit without specific measurements. For instance, the build team in conjunction with the media team and the CAD team coach remodeled the cover for our robot. Originally, this was to be made with coroplast, but those prototypes revealed that the cover would interfere with robot functions, mainly the running of chain. Also, the team found that certain parts would need to be sturdier. As such, the build team made the parts that needed to be sturdier out of lexan, which is much more resistant to force and change compared to coroplast. But this means that the CAD team had to model these parts, for which we luckily had measurements.

CAD has also been working on our final wiring and pneumatic assemblies. As these are not exact compared to the robot, the team has no need to take exact measurements, which would be impractical anyways. While that is completed, the CAD team has also fixed various issues found while doing test renders of our robot, which mainly consisted of visible sketches and duplicate parts that were to be deleted.

Finally, the CAD team has also continued work on the Robot Binder. This binder, as stated earlier, was meant to our attempt at winning the Robot Design Award, and it showcases numerous sub-functions of our robot, with planar views, ISO’s, and physical pictures. Ultimately, his week has been the final stretch for CAD.

Animation by David S.
The animation team has made some very good progress over the last few weeks. We have basically finished modeling all items and characters that are to be used in the animation and are working on the finishing touches of texturing and arranging various scenes. We initially ran into some issues with “rigging” the model of the main character (giving him a skeleton and telling the software how that skeleton affects him and makes him move), as even some of the best of the team were rusty on how to do this. After some research, we were able to figure out the most efficient way to do this, and even learned some new techniques to improve our work. With this rigging as well as the scene composition nearing completion, the only remaining step is the physical animation step. This may prove to be the hardest challenge yet, as getting everything we want to show into the 30 second time limit is always quite difficult. We hope to have the animation finished and rendering by the end of this week, and are working hard to achieve this goal.

Media by Danielle G.
For the 6th week of build season, the media team worked hard on documenting the final efforts of the team. We filmed the testing of the robot in our Audion. We also worked on our second to last Vlog for the year. For this Vlog, we created a humorous Valentine’s themed segment. We also created a short film to thank our sponsor BAE for their support and funding throughout the season. With things winding down, we changed our focus to the creation of our Daisy Awards, which we plan to give to other teams during competition. These Daisy Awards are meant for our team to celebrate the achievement of others. We have also been busy creating or print design materials including buttons, pit posters, and pit banners. All in all, we have had a very successful week!

Web by Emily O.
A few minor updates occurred this week. The team’s week six vlog is now up on YouTube and the site. In addition, we have gone through all of the emails received for our Team in a Box and picked out some of the best to put on out web site. The best replies of the past two years are now updated on the site!

2012 Build Season: Week 5

February 16, 2012 | By Kirsten

Design & Build by David C.

Tuesday – Today was a very exciting day for the team, as the robot started to come together for the first time. The team tested a finalized version of the shooter prototype (yes, still a prototype, sadly) and were very pleased with the results. The claw mechanism also is approaching completion; it was hooked up to the main robot and was successful in performing its function. The team is also planning to test an auto-balancing code that utilizes the gyro on the robot. The robot is close to done, but there’s still a lot of work to be done and parts (and awesomeness) to be added.

Thursday – The team continued to work on the different aspects of the robot. The claw mechanism was tested as part of the robot. A few tweaks are still necessary. Our Progress is only hindered by small problems at this point, but, as the coaches tell us, we’ve been in worse situations before. More testing of the drive system and shooter has proven to be very satisfactory.

Friday- The build team encountered a severe problem in relation to our robot’s design and the behavior of the game pieces. With our current design, the foam basketballs would contact each other and essentially stick together. This would cause the one ball to roll over the other and jam the entire system. We were extremely frustrated with this discovery, but had we not found this out, it would have been disastrous on the field. Core members stayed late in order to discuss a new design strategy as well as our plan for the remainder of build season. With the limited time remaining, we believe we have found a way to avoid such issues and still come out on top with the limited time remaining to us.

Saturday – Today, we built a new robot.

CAD by Pranav K.

This week, the CAD team was faced with the preparing the Robot Binder, where we included various pictures and text to describe our robot’s design and its various parts and subsystems. By this point, CAD had already designated pages for each subsystem that the whole team had predicted from the initial design stages; mainly drive, electrical, pneumatics, shooter, claw, and frame were used withe the assistance of the program in Adobe InDesign (similar to to Microsoft Publisher). We began to render various shots of the subsystems of the CAD models and incorporate some physical pictures of our robot and its parts. With some difficulties in discerning exactly how and where to place each image (once rendered), the CAD team is now on its way to completing the binder and having a fully organized system for our robot design. The team hopes to win the Robot Design Award, for which the binder is a required element.

In addition, the CAD Team is now completing the connections between the electrical board wires to motors outside of the metallic belly-pan. The general wiring of specific parts on the belly-pan from the distribution board to other parts (i.e. Jaguars, Spikes, etc) as well as connection of the cRio are now being made. So with this wiring, the team was able to see a more realistic model of the robot.

There is one large subsystem with which we have had difficulty: the claw. The CAD team members have had to re-create a new claw and replace it with our old claw. We have also integrated pistons with the claw that will control the movement of the claw from a retracted position to an extended position.

Overall, CAD is working diligently to create the best model possible, and we are eager to
continue our work.

Business by Allison P.

This week, the Business Team worked mostly on the second ever edition of Team 341’s newsletter and on the 2012 Business Plan. We have finished the What We’ve Been Working On article for our newsletter. We are still working an article about our travel plans this season for our second newsletter. Also, a picture collage will be added to the first page of our newsletter. Once all articles and other touches are finished, our second edition can be released and sent to our team and sponsors! We hope the second edition will be even better than our first publication.

We have begun making updates to the InDesign version of the business plan based on the areas that we marked for revision last week. After we receiving more financial information, we will be able to update the budget section of the business plan. We have also made a few revisions to the Competitive Analysis section and hope to soon update it completely.

One of our main jobs is to track the team expenses. We will shortly begin to set up and create a
spreadsheet to log expenditures. We will be tracking expenses by project team; this will be organized by columns for the date of the expense, the amount, and the vendor. The creation of this spreadsheet will be able to help our team stay organized.

Media by Emily O.

As always, the media team has been hard at work on our weekly vlog. This week, we interviewed our programmer, James and mechanical team member Eli on our robot’s progress. We also have an interview with our media coach, Kirsten. Our humorous segment highlighted the numerous awkward moments in robotics. It is quite hilarious!

While some of us were working on the vlog, others were preparing the awards we give out to other teams during each competition. The imagery team (basically the media team with a few differences) were seen in the shop using jigsaws and sandpaper, preparing the bases for our awards. Others started stripping wires for the petals of our daisy awards, initially conceptualized by imagery leader Patrick.

The media team also focused on finishing and updating a few other odd jobs. Our donation video, started last year, is almost done. We are also focusing on revamping our pit posters so that they hold relevant content for our competitions. They will be printed soon! In preparation for the competition season, a few of us started brainstorming questions for scouting. We hope to finalize this information soon. Additionally, students worked toward their submission for the Woodie Flowers award focusing on their mentor of choice.

Web by Emily O.

Much of the energies of the web team were spent in the media category this week, but nonetheless a few changes were made. Our footer was updated with our new sponsors for this year. We created this in Photoshop and then uploaded it to the website. In addition, the Ramp Riot blog was written and posted with results from the competition. Late in the week, we realized that the viewer for our CAD models was broken. After a bit of problem-solving and searching we realized that a link in the code was broken and fixed this for all of the CAD models. The coming weeks will hopefully see more time dedicated to the site and more improvements.