BEST Robotics – Week 4 As explained in earlier posts, the first three weeks involved a large amount of new student training, cardboard prototypes, idea exploration, and strategy discussion. As we moved into Week 4, we were fairly certain of our strategic direction… had a broad idea of what could be accomplished… but hadn’t … […]
BEST Robotics – Weeks 2 & 3 In Weeks 2 and 3, our team continued working on building the field, prototyping using the game pieces, and analyzing the scoring opportunities to shape our strategy. At this point, we’ve only been meeting twice a week (and had to cancel last Thursday), so we’ve only had three meetings since our
BEST Robotics – The Kickoff As previously noted, our belief is that the best way to get better at building robots… is to build robots. Also, it’s what the students signed up for… and kind of the purpose of the club. BEST was a good fit for our club last year, with emphasis on construction
Thursday, we continued to build prototypes, but we also wanted to start getting some more quantifiable data off of them. Additionally, we finished the spindle upgrade on the gantry mill, and began some work on vision targeting. Few positive notes, we got our shipment of game pieces in, so now we have more to test ball
Wednesday our goal was to extend our first round of prototypes, as well as start making a more legitimate intake (and not turn this one into a shooter). We like the idea of an over the top roller intake. It has been used successfully in many games, and we were happy with ours in 2016.
Tuesday was our first “official meeting” after kickoff. We started it off with a quick rules quiz by mentor John Griffith. Our students are awesome and read the rules thoroughly, so we knocked this out quickly. Pic 1 We took care of the requisite chores such as doing inventory on our kit of parts. Moving
Who said you can’t get a workout roboting! We decided we needed to haul half our workshop to Texas Instruments for kickoff, we got to spent a good portion of the day Monday hauling a trailer worth of robot supplies back to our shop. Many hands make for light work. We purchased/built a gantry mill
Unfortunately, we didn’t have a great place to meet at a team on Sunday, and we were a bit burned out from planning and hosting kickoff. Our team stayed in touch via the internets, and we all worked on reading the rules and asking a lot of questions. We are going to try to do
It’s finally come! #Stronghold has arrived and it looks like the anticipation was not in vain… it looks AWESOME! We were excited to help host the Dallas kickoff event with Texas Instrument’s support, and be able to hang out with 24 other awesome Dallas teams for the day. Peter Balyta, President of TI Ed. Tech
