Written by Isabel D.
Come and join us on our sprouting journey as we dive into this week’s canopy of ideas and prototypes! The various busy leaders of all our subsystems have been—and continue to be—working hard. We all have one burning question: which mechanism will we use? What prototype will prove victorious?
The no-sleep-always-grinding mechanical team has been working on four main subsystems (RIP Drivebase—you will be missed!): the speaker, intake, amp & trap, and climb. We’ve strategically divided up the groups to include two student leaders. #OrganizationIsKey However, we are in need of more lovely workers and team members to come in and help with these instrumental prototypes to finalize a design for the official 20232024 robot. Various members have been contributing to the CADing of these prototypes, and they’re more than proud to say that it is almost finalized! They’ve finally reached the difficult part of the engineering process: integration and decision-making.
The most important question concerning the robot is most definitely deciding what color our fierce robot should be. Robot Coordinator Owen suggests we should have a scary-looking black robot to instill fear in our competition and because black robots, simply put, are cool. The opposing side suggests we should stick to our traditional colors: blue, yellow, and green. Both sides came to an agreement: a yellow robot would look ugly due to all the grease that could cover it.
The very-swag-better-than-all-the-subsystems electrical team has been wiring up the prototypes that have been finished. More specifically, the mock Amp Arm has been wired up by them, and they have handed it over to the programmers to work on.
The never-touched-grass-in-their-life programmers have been working on the control system for our upcoming Sparky robots, figuring out the auto align to different places on the field, and working on controlling the amp mechanism. One of their highlights is the AI Game Piece Detection. This makes use of sensors and cameras pointed at the front of the robot, which is where our intake will be located.
The Marketing and Outreach team has been hard at work, cooking up the best-ever essays known to mankind! Their main goals for the week include creating social media posts and videos and, arguably the most important goal, making progress on our award submissions
