The 2023 FRC season has begun, and the RoboChargers are ready for it! The new FRC challenge, CHARGED UP, has got us excited for all the new and interesting obstacles just waiting to be solved. This was an exciting kickoff for us. Like many teams, we faced significant challenges during the pandemic and started out […]
More Prototyping After roughly a week of prototyping, we unfortunately had questions coming in at the rate of answers. Can we build an effective shooter, despite relatively little team experience, by using online resources to get close and then dial it in? Will a roller or belted intake function properly this year with our preferred
Detailed Prototyping Saturday was a pretty critical day. We basically had 6 hours total of meeting time during the entire school week, and tacked on another 9 hours on Saturday. While the Tuesday through Thursday prototyping was predominately build via rough hand tools, we began to upgrade prototypes to CAD driven detailed prototypes to get
Stu-Bots I arrived home late Wednesday night to my concerned wife wondering “what the heck I ordered”… which can only mean… game pieces are here! With game pieces, we could now play “stu-bots” or “student robots”. This exercise is always valuable for being able to visualize how the game will flow. It also gives us a
Prototyping While the strategy team continues to decide what needs to be built, we decided to start with some VERY basic prototyping to help everyone start to visualize manipulator, field, and game piece interactions. We’ve found that especially with new members, staring at a white board to discuss how “hard/easy” something is for a Weighted Objective Table,
Group Rules Discussion / Intro to Strategy The first half of the meeting was spent revisiting the rules, with a little added context as we all had a chance to let them soak in over the weekend. While we aren’t yet trying to pick a robot design, we began to move past just memorizing a fact (fuel
Yasssssssssss! Time to play robots again. Good Guy Frank, the closest thing FRC has to Santa Claus, has given us a late Christmas gift of STEAMWorks… and we are #excite. Enough open field to play defense, two games pieces to keep it interesting, shooting and manipulating… this is going to be awesome 🙂 Texas Instruments Kickoff
BEST Robotics – Check In / Inspection So… that happened. Lulz. We show up yesterday evening at ~8:57pm to meet the 9:00pm latest check-in time. Among other things, we cannot find a way to get the robot in position to fit in the 24″ starting cube. Additionally, we had ~4-5 minor items to fix that
BEST Robotics – Week 6 It doesn’t matter what competition we are in, or how well we think we planned out the build process… the final week always turns into a sprint for the finish line. We finished up the marketing presentation and notebook, but as of Monday, had yet to create ~90% of the robot and 50%
BEST Robotics – Week 5 This week… bit crazy… but it felt good! Sometimes it takes a hard deadline to get us moving, but it was great to see how well the team responded. The level of focus and productivity (including all of our new team members) is currently higher than it has been all season, and