Miss Daisy has finally finished the build season! This year’s game challenge included some nostalgic aspects from previous seasons. In this game, there are two hubs: one for each alliance. These hubs, inspired from the 2022 – RAPID REACTSM game, alternate between ON and OFF phases, indicating when an alliance can or cannot score. Similar to 2006 – AIM HIGH, to score, our robot shoots balls into the alliance hub while it is ON. It may seem simple at first, but our Game Strategy & Scouting subteam delved into the depths of this game challenge during our first week of build season! They looked into every single aspect of the Game Manual and helped the entire team decide what type of robot to build. They also worked on our Robot Will-Do list while the rest of our Robot Design & Build subteams were prototyping mechanisms to work towards the list’s objectives.
Our prototyping mechanisms led us to two different architectures: the “whale” and the “firehose”. The “whale” architecture is designed to store a maximum of 50 balls, but comes with the drawbacks of a fixed shooter and being prone to defense. The “firehose” architecture is designed to store a lower maximum of 10 balls and has a higher shooting rate, but requires a turret to shoot-on-the-move, which is more difficult to wire and program. We originally decided on the whale approach, thinking that scoring a large number of points at once would be advantageous, but after reconsidering the firehose, we realized that the whale design was just as difficult to design due to handling a large amount of balls at once. After evaluating the pros and cons of both archetypes, we believed that the firehose design would be best for this game as it is able to shoot fuel from anywhere on the alliance side of the field, ferry fuel from the neutral zone, and quickly score points.
For our second week of build season, we had a definite strategy planned out. We were perfectly on schedule until… we got a winter storm. All of the snow forced us and many other Mid-Atlantic teams off track, so we fell behind schedule. The Robot Design & Build team was able to complete our shooter and intake prototypes for our initial “Beta Bot” while the Marketing & Outreach team worked diligently on our two Woodie Flowers Award submissions, our Impact Award submission, build season pictures, and a ton of posters.
During our third week of build season (AKA our second week of a winter storm…), our Robot Design & Build team continued working on all of their Robot CAD. Our Electrical subteam finished up all of their wiring diagrams while also finishing the wiring for our Beta Bot. Our Programming subteam on the other hand had been working with the new “April Tag” setup, which is used to target the hubs/goals, and had been testing vision systems for them. They were also working nonstop to develop code for all of the robot subsystems!
As for our fourth week of build season, this was our last week working on the Beta Bot! We had to enforce a stricter schedule for our Robot Design & Build team due to the winter weather making us fall behind schedule, and it was a great help! We were able to lay out realistic expectations and communicate well, so all of our students were motivated to continue working. We managed to finish manufacturing the shooter, intake, and overall robot structure for the Beta Bot and were able to perform many climber tests!
For our fifth week of build season, we finished working on the Beta Bot! Due to our time crunch, we had to begin testing all of our robot’s systems to improve them for the final “Comp Bot”. All of our subteams worked together to build a powerful robot this week, while our Marketing & Outreach subteams worked behind the scenes on awards and documenting our progress. Our dedicated Impact team worked on preparing for their Impact Award presentation.
During our sixth week of build season, the competitions were slowly creeping up on us! Our Robot Design & Build team installed the Intake, Serializer, Table, and Shooter onto our robot! The last missing component was our Climber, which was not mounted yet due our robot being overweight. The Comp Bot ended up being around 113.2 lbs with wires and without the Climber and other electrical components, so this was a big issue for us!
For our last week of build season, our Robot Design & Build team was continuously pondering how to help our robot lose weight. We ended up cutting off a bit of weight by making various components thinner in size, but we were still unable to install the Climber onto our robot. This marked the end of our larger robot work, and to finish off the week, we travelled to Team 103’s full playing field to test out our robot in action and to let our drive team have some practice!
In short, we made the most of our build season with the little time that we had! Although we experienced many bumps along the way with the difficult weather, we were still able to produce a strong robot that all of us are proud of! We were also able to submit three very strong award submissions; two for Woodie Flowers and one for the Impact Award. Now, we are excited to see what the competition season will bring for our team!
