WEEK 1 UPDATE

      Our seventh annual build season has kicked off! The team is now 33 members strong, and we have hit 30% female participation and 45% people of color. On the first day of build season, the team separated into groups to discuss designs for the four subsystems: intake, climber, shooter, and wheel spinner. 

Intake: 
      The intake group’s responsibility is to capture power cells(balls) in the fastest way possible while holding the maximum amount of power cells. Some of the ideas included a vacuum system, two wheels spinning towards each other, and a horizontal bar spinning with wheels perpendicular to it. They looked at some of the intake systems on our older robots for reference. For now, they are committed to the spinning horizontal bar design and are currently in the prototyping phase.

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Climber: 
      The main task of the climber group is to design a mechanism for the robot to be able to climb the shield generator(structure to climb on) in order to score additional points. First, this group began brainstorming several designs, keeping in mind that the mechanism should be under 2 ft in order to navigate around the field. The mechanism would have to extend 6ft in order to hang on the shield generator. After a discussion, the group narrowed it down to two designs and will soon move on to the prototype designing stage. ​

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Control Panels: 
      This week, a section of the team worked on designing a mechanism that would be able to manipulate the control panels. This subsystem of the robot will be responsible for rotating the control panels(colored disks) a certain amount of times to activate stages of the shield generator(climbing structure). The software team is working on writing code that should be able to detect which color the control panel should stop on in order to activate the stages. This team is designing their top ideas in CAD(Computer Aided Design). The group is still on the CAD stage.

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Shooter: 
      The main task of the shooter mechanism is to shoot power cells(balls) into the power port to score points. This group came up with six design ideas and narrowed them down to two using a pros and cons list. This allowed them to pick the best out of the two designs, start a CAD model, and build a functioning prototype. By testing it, this group has been able to make alterations to the prototype as well.

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