On Sunday, January 5th,we had our annual team design meeting at Crittenton Hospital to discuss ideas for the upcoming game. We have been working very hard to get ready for the season as quickly and efficiently as possible, especially since there were three snow days in week one that scrambled our schedule.

The Chassis Team met for the first time this week. We learned about the type of wheels that we use on our robots and continued to assemble them after separating our team in to two groups.

The Ball Acquisition Team has been working closely together with other engineering teams this week. We have built prototypes and tested them out, some going better than others. We have been in discussion about which shooting mechanism to use for our robot, and have come up with a punching/slingshot design that is not official yet.

1-11-14-035 The Ball Shooter Team has been working with the other build teams to build prototypes of different types of shooters to decide on the optimal design. The manipulator team worked mostly on a “puncher” design while the above chassis team worked on a “slingshot” design. We have come to an unofficial consensus as to what we want to build, and the teams have begun working on producing that design.

The Field Team has diligently worked to create the high goal of this year’s Aerial Assist field. We’ve also created the mid-line tress and will later focus on making the low cube goals.For the past two weeks, the Programming Team has been updating software, planning the robot code structure, and beginning to train new programming sub-team members to use the Java cRIO libraries. Prototyping several subsystems has begun, including vision processing on a BeagleBone and pneumatic shifting for changing gears. Training with GitHub has also begun.

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This week in the Digital Media Team, we discussed our general jobs, like blogs for the sub-teams, interviews with students/mentors/alumni, updating the website, article-scanning for errors, and our new website design. We came up with three new jobs: media consultant which is a job about deciding to keep some social media sites and getting rid of others. Head editor edits the blogs, making sure there aren’t any errors. Site manager takes care of visual and technical aspects. The social media manager makes sure that our social media websites are being updated regularly.

The Business Plan Team discussed various updates to our Executive Summary in regards to FIRST’s requirements for the Entrepreneurship Award.

Over the past week, the Marketing Team has been organizing their goals for the FIRST build season. They have been preparing how to give tours to the professionals they are going to invite to see the team. The marketing team has also been busy at work designing a new yellow team shirt, and new shirts for the Hub City Regional.

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The Photo/Video Team has been up to the usual picture-taking and video-making, and has also been focusing on creating this year’s Chairman’s video.

On Wednesday, March 4th we will be leaving Rochester Hills and heading for Lubbock, Texas to attend the The Hub City Regional event. We are taking around 28 students and will be returning on Sunday, March 9th.

Written by Cameron Johnson

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