Ultimate Ascent!

This year’s FRC challenge has been released! On January 5th, the Riverdale Robotics Team awoke early and drove to Evergreen High School in Vancouver WA. After listening to recorded speeches by Dean Kamen and Woody Flowers, this year’s challenge “Ultimate Ascent” was announced. “Ultimate Ascent” is played on a flat 27’x 54′ field by two competing alliances of three robots each. Each side of the field is wall containing three goals of different heights. Robot’s objectives is to score as many flying disks as they can into the goals during a two minute and fifteen second match. The higher the goal in which the disk is scored, the more points the alliance receives. The match begins with a fifteen second autonomous period in which robots operate independently; disks scored during this period are worth twice as many points. As the match comes to an end, robots have fifteen seconds to attempt to climb and hang from one of the two periods located in the center of the field.

Our team is very excited to be entering our fifth year and we are beginning to prototype potential designs for this year’s robot.

Spokane, here we come!

For months the dates for the upcoming Spokane Regional have been marked on our calendar and now its just around the corner! This one of the events that team members have been looking forward to all season and it’s going to be tons of fun! It will be great chance for team members to bond even more, especially with a six hour car ride just to get there. We have our hotel booked and have decided where we will eat out as a team (which, we’ve also decided is non optional)

To prepare for this event, we’ve been keeping ourselves busy. We have been working on writing code for autonomous, making improvements to our conveyor system and targeting system. We’ve completely re-written our business plan, and we are in the process of making many more buttons! We are just all full of excitement and can’t wait!

Teams Members Help Mother Nature and Future Engineers!

More volunteering, will it never end? But of course not! How else are we going to spend our weekends? Saturday, six members of our team volunteered with the Stream Team in Vancouver Washington to plant trees at a local college. While other people woke up to watch the snow, we were all busy digging holes, “tubing” or planting trees. The weather was crazy! The day began with it snowing, then raining, and when it wasn’t hailing then it was sunny. It was team bonding to the extreme! We were all covered with mud by the time we were done and couldn’t feel our fingers or toes but it was still a lot of fun. Team members said they would defiantly do it again.

But wait, there’s more! On Sunday, two team members helped volunteer at an FTC (FIRST Tech Challenge) Championship where they helped in the pit and as a tech assistant. The pit is where all of the teams store their robot and tools where they can hang out before matches. It was volunteers’ job to make sure teams knew where to go and when the next match was. Meanwhile on the field, volunteers learned how the field management system worked. “I got to see all the cool designs that other high schoolers had come up with, met some cool people and even thought up some good ideas for our team next year.” says Elliott Capek. It was a lot of fun to see different teams’ approach to the challenge and it was cool to see everyone getting excited about FIRST.

Awards = Done

The Chairmans and Dean’s List awards are complete and have been submitted, which is one less thing to worry about in the last week of the build season. The Chairmans award is the most prestigious award a team can win and with that in mind, the focus of our Chairmans essay is the importance of sustainability. In our essay we talk about how we want to make sure that our team is able to“stay afloat” next year after all of the seniors graduate and what we have done to ensure this.This year we have been trying to make sure that the younger members of our team are given just as much work to do as the older members and that they feel like they are able to contribute new ideas. To read more, click here!

In this past week we also worked hard on the Deans List,  nominating Amy Wiegand as our teams semi-finalist and a great example of someone who represents the ideas of FIRST. She has been involved in robotics for a long time and loves it. Amy goes above and beyond the expectations of what a team member is required to do. She has organized our all of our volunteer opportunities, and rather than doing everything herself, she teaches younger members how to design and build the robot. You can read more about Amy and her amazing contribution to our team here.

Week Six

We are now well into the final week of the build season and the robot is coming along nicely. The tower is now attached to the robot frame and so is the turret. The front roller and the conveyor belt have also been added. In other news we have constructed one of the ramps that will be  placed on the field so we can now test how well our robot can travel over it.

Currently our robot is 10lbs overweight, so we have been working hard trying to remove as much unnecessary material as possible. So far we have shaved off 4lbs, and hopefully by the end of the day there will nothing left weighing our robot down!

Only 3 days left til ship date!

Pandas!

It’s so exciting — we have come to a decision on our new logo … sort of. Unlike previous years, this logo is pretty simple but still manages to represent our team. To come to this decision we had everyone take a survey and vote on which of the several possible logos they liked best. Some people didn’t like the idea of having a logo that was too cute and others thought that by changing our logo we would be less memorable. But even though the old logo looked cool it was just too complicated. This one, although much simpler, keeps the theme of pandas while still being kind of robot-like. But afraid of it being too cute, we have also come up with some other possible ideas, so we’re not sure which one we are going to choose just yet. But come on… how can you say no to that face?

The beginning of the end….of the beginning!!

That’s right, it’s the start of week five. Our team is actually a bit more ahead than we have been in past years, which is to say we’re a bit less than four weeks behind schedule. But we can do it! With practices every day from now until ship date (the 22nd), we’re sure we can finish. Even if it means we get no sleep (which is why we’re all stockpiling sleep today).  Tension will build, tempers will flare and at least a few nights of sleep will be lost but we will prevail! Good luck to all teams in our position, this is the best week of the year!

On a side note, here’s our somewhat late video summary of week four…

Week Four is Over

As we finish week four we have finally completed the bumpers and are moving on and working on the “tower”. The “tower” is basically a holding chamber where balls will be stored during competition and once there, balls will be able to be transferred to the turret by traveling on a conveyor belt. We have built a prototype and are now testing different conveyor belt material.

In other news, the Chairman’s and Dean’s List awards are being worked on and we are making good progress on the marketing binder. With the build season almost over, we are also still trying to come up with a good design for our new logo — maybe we’ll have a panda running around doing something crazy or maybe riding a bike while holding several balloons in one paw? We don’t know yet but are excited about the possibilities.

Four weeks down, two to go…

Camera Code on its way…

Over the past week, Team 2915 has been busy writing camera code for our robot. This is one of the most important parts of the robot this year because shooting a basketball into a hoop by hand is very difficult.

Our basic strategy is to use the two backboards as “targets” that our robot will look for. When it sees them, it will use their size and angle to figure out its position on the field. The robot will constantly be looking for these backboards. When it finds them, it will lock on and constantly face them with our turret. On the push of a button, our robot will fire a ball which will hopefully find its way into the turret.

We’ve spent quite a while working on the camera code, but it’s coming along. We’ve found some great resources, which will be linked below. Good luck to any other team working on camera code! Seventeen days till ship!

General documentation

Excellent sample code from wpijavacv

Chief Delphi post – one of many good ones

Week Three Done!

The third week of the build season is over. It’s a scary thought but I guess it’s true… there are only three weeks left. Yikes!

We’ve taken advantage of our four day weekend and had longer meetings on Thursday and Friday. We have finished CADing the drive system and are currently working on the wheels. The mechanical team has finished their second prototype and the wheels are now attached to the robot frame. The electrical sub-team has started to make the electrical board, deciding to make more of a “filing cabinet” for better organization.

Code for the shooting mechanism and roller system are completed and our programming team’s newest challenge is trying to figure out the camera. Our website design is almost final and we are just tweaking the colors to have the coolest-looking website ever. Several members of our team have been working on our Marketing and Safety Binder and other members met early Friday morning to work on the Dean’s List and Chairmans Award.

It doesn’t seem real that we’re halfway through the build season already, but as the days go by the excitement seems to grow and we are looking forward to the next few weeks.