Build Season Blog

Week 3 (Jan. 18 - Jan. 24)

As week 3 comes to an end we can start to see all of the work the team has put into the robot. At the beginning of the week the CAD department continued working on final mechanisms and figured out how they will all work with each other. Similar to last week, once a part was finished in CAD they sent the drawings to the shop so they would could continue cutting and drilling to prepare everything for assembly. At the end of the week the CAD department prepared the first water jet order to be sent at the beginning of next week. If you haven't heard of what water jetting is, it is where high pressured water is sent through a nozzle to precisely cut metal and plastic pieces. They can also use a bending tool to make the piece three dimensional.

While CAD was finishing up, Fabrication mainly worked on our elevator. On Friday a group got together and prototyped our final mechanism: the "de-algaeifyer". Programming had a busy week taking a break from the physical side of the robot and went back to the classroom to learn about the theory of command-based programming. Along with that they assigned people to work on programming the different mechanisms on the robot.

Week 2 (Jan. 11 - Jan. 17)

Week 2 was a very productive week for all of the departments! After taking a quick break on Sunday, we were back in full swing this week with good attendance at the beginning of the week. Once prototyping came to an end on Monday, we decided the what mechanisms would work best for the game, the CAD department got real busy. 

CAD has done an excellent job designing our final mechanisms quickly.  After a mechanism is designed it's sent to the shop where they have started cutting the metal for our parts and roughly assembling the subsystems. Although we are waiting on our swerve modules (an important part of the robot), we have been able to stay busy by prioritizing other parts of the robot so it will be ready to test once the modules get here. 

The programming department has made some great progress with vision and odometry. They are currently using last year's robot to test while this years is being built. Once the 2025 robot is built they will be able to easily transition over to it and will be way ahead because of the valuable testing they are doing now.

Week 1 (Jan. 4 - Jan. 10)

We've had great start to our season with several brainstorming sessions and building some functional prototypes allowing us to get a better feel for how the game pieces will work with the field. We're quickly moving to CADing mechanisms and fabricating first drafts that will go on the robot!

On Reveal Day we started the day with a wonderful team breakfast to nourish us for the exhausting upcoming day once the game was released. After watching the game release we quickly cleaned up our rental space and headed over to Parkade where we started breaking down the game manual. We split into groups so everyone could read some part of the game manual and so each individual person doesn't have to read the entire thing. After groups broke down their section, we all reconvened as a team and presented important parts of our section so everyone knew the ins and outs of the manual. Finally, by mid-afternoon we started putting together rough designs based on different strategies we want to try out. These were very rough designs but important to get our brains to think of all possible/different ideas.

Sunday and Monday were used to solidify our strategy and get a more thought out design for each mechanism. By Tuesday we had our strategy which is as follows: Go for coral placement on the L1, L2, and L3 branches, knock off algae from the reef, score algae into the processor, and finally go for a deep climb. Deciding our strategy allows us to figure out our design even more.

Tuesday - Thursday we worked on prototyping both our algae mechanism and manipulator (what will be used to move the coral). Prototyping helped us see what needed to be changed in our design so we didn't continue with faulty ideas. Once the proof of concept prototyping was done CAD was started and fabrication continued to work on more design ideas. 

On Friday and Saturday we took a quick break from FRC and went to help with the annual Columbia FLL Tournament. This is a fun event hosted by Kate McKenzie and Morgan Kruse which the Army Ants get to help out with and as a result we get to present our community impact at the competitions we go to.