Build Season Week 3

Team Operations:
This past week, Team Operations finalized our Hour of Code event. The event will be running from 5PM on Friday, February 9th at Billerica Memorial High School for students in grades 2-5. If you are interested in registering your student for this event, RSVP to [email protected] with your child’s name and grade.  Spots are limited and parents are required to stay for the entirety of the event. Students finalized team banner designs for the 2023-24 season CRESCENDO and completed executive summaries for this year’s Impact Award submission.

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​Climber:
This week, the climber subgroup started designing and prototyping. After doing research, they discovered that using extendable boat hooks would be the most space-efficient design to lift the robot up onto the STAGE, which is composed of a fixed chain at the center of the field.

Intake:
This week the Intake group made needed improvements to their Rev1 design to prepare for the manufacturing of our Rev2 robot. We made improvements to our design, making it more practical and compliant with competition rules. This included changing our motor mounts and redesigning parts of our intake to fit inside the frame perimeter. This resulted in us having to shift the intake geometry. In addition to this, one of our main problems from the Rev1 design was that the intake was dragging on the ground, which required slight redesign revisions. Finally, we worked with the shooter group to help finalize our plans on handing off notes between the intake and shooter mechanisms.

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Shooter Subsystem
The shooter group tested their first revision and gained a lot of useful information that will help them while designing Rev2. Students tested how note compression will affect the accuracy and distance of shooting notes, which helped determine the final dimensions of the shooter. After testing Rev1, CAD designs for Rev2 began. They worked with the climber group to figure out how the shooter will attach to the arm and power transmission in order to pivot. Due to their poor handoff between the intake to the shooter, they decided to change the feeder to a horizontal orientation instead of vertical one to help center the notes better.

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Software:
The software team successfully programmed software to complete two autonomous routines. This allows our robot to complete both a two and four note autonomous run without any driver interaction. The software team also worked on using distance sensors to detect if a note is completely inside the robot and used QR-code like “April Tags” to align with field elements. They also started writing code for the double-jointed arm, which will allow the robot to climb a fixed chain.