wEEK 2 RECAP

Over the past week, Team Operations started working on this year’s business and safety plans, updating and changing the format where necessary. Members conducted the next Senior Spotlight interview, along with planning an introductory, block-based coding session for younger students called ‘Hour of Code’. Towards the end of the week, members began planning a robot demonstration at the local senior center and discussed strategies for running a scratch ticket raffle soon. Students finished by doing a SWOT analysis for the past year, considering the team’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats before coming up with ideas to better adapt to and eliminate the discussed weaknesses. ​​

---

Software: 
This week, the software group continued working on the drivetrain. Members made progress on autonomous pathing and were able to utilize a program to draw a path and follow it. Early vision tracking code was drafted, which will allow students to align with the AprilTag vision fiducials (markers for the robot to detect) on the field to correctly position the robot automatically. More work was done on the drivetrain simulation code, allowing the group to simulate a drivetrain virtually which will give them more flexibility while testing.

Lift/Extend/Launch:
At the start of this week, the subsystem group discussed methods to shoot cones and cubes onto their respective nodes, going back and forth between a shooter or an extension method. After deliberation, members decided on the slanted elevator system as the most efficient method going forward. Afterwards, they explored the 7 extension methods the launcher group had previously researched. As the week went on, the subsystem regrouped and considered the logistics of the elevator. By the end of the discussion, students decided to add a wrist to better accommodate their goals without hindering design progress. By the end of the week, the group had finalized a simple system sketch. Over the next week, the group plans to continue figuring out the details of this design while working alongside the intake group to discuss pathways and other mechanical components. 

Intake:​
The goal of this week for intake was to start finalizing the design and the archetype in relation to the robot as a whole. They started the week by discussing with the other subsystems and finalizing an overall robot archetype. The intake group decided to concentrate on the double-roller intake and moved on to finalizing the idea. Even though the group has the intake, the handoff to the elevator is just as important. One group split off to design a potential mechanism to hand off game pieces, while the other worked on finalizing its geometry, and a prototype for our ground intake. The second group also focused on making a new, adjustable prototype with metal. Despite losing time due to a snow day on Friday, the group is hopeful that through testing, necessary information can be gained over a short period of time.

---