What Are We Working On? Status Update – Feb 27, 2024

Our apologize for not writing recently. We have been busy working hard on our robot. However, we know have something to show for it!

We have, in no particular order:

  • Made an all in one pickup and launch mechanism
  • A sliding rail system to raise and lower the launcher
  • A stage to test against (we would practice with it if we had time)
  • A speaker
  • An amplifier

You may have noticed that there is no mention or image of the drive-train. The whole situation with that is complicated, and we still do not know what we are going to use. The only hope for us right now is that fact that we have a (supposedly) working kit bot. Hopefully more progress will have been made before we load up for Knoxville.

But there is more for a robotics team to work on besides building and programming a robot. Our business team has been hard at work since January, writing up our business plan along with Deans list, Woody Flowers, and Impact award submissions. Our graphics team has changed up our shirts and banner with the updated sponsors list.

I would like to shout out Taylor for maintaining our relationships with both our sponsors, as well as with our school administrators. She has been instrumental in getting both parts and funding, and ensuring that our team can continue not only to exist, but also to meet as often as we need. Without her work, last minute trips to Texas for worlds would not be possible. Even going to regionals could be challenging if we did not have the relationship with our school admins, or our sponsors.

On a similar thread, I would also like to shout out our school admins for being such awesome people, and actively supporting our team. We honestly could not exist it it weren’t for their support. Thank you.

2023 Season Recap

What a great season. Ended the Magnolia Regional with rank 17, making it into the Playoff’s. Ended the Rocket City regional with rank 50 unfortunately. Great games though.

What did we do besides compete though? In the summer after the competitions, we did several outreach events. These include Robot Demos, a Lego build meeting at the local library, and more.

Team Number Change

TLDR; We changed our teams number recently, their is not practical change because of this.

This is a late announcement (almost 2 months late), but back in October, we officially changed our teams number from FRC-8733 to FRC-538. There is no real benefit to our team for us doing so. However, there are some reasons we made this change. The biggest reason is that it helps back our teams identity. Our teams name is Renaissance which means rebirth. Our team mentors (Taylor and Drew Whisenant) were mentors for a now retired FRC team, whose number was FRC-538, our new team number. By taking that number (which we would not have been able to get otherwise) means that we are figuratively re-birthing that team. This helps build our team brand (such as it is).

On a more practical note, there is a real world advantage to our number change. Because our new number is lower then then our old number, we are able to get a pit closer to the play field, requiring a shorter walk. While not much of a difference, it still is something. There aren’t any other benefits to our number change.

Status Update [4/6/2022]

Here is our third status update, and possibly the last one for a while. Yesterday was our last build meeting, although we may do a bit more work before the practice matches and the competition Thursday-Saturday.

What we got done

  • Programming. I think the code has been done for a bit, however, I think there has been a few improvements just making the code better overall.
  • Battery mount. For the longest time, we just sat the battery next to the robot when testing. We finally got it mounted.
  • Electronics mounting. Up until Monday, we had all of our electronics, except for motors, on or development board. The electronics we had to mount included our Robo Rio (our robot controller,) the power distribution hub, motor controllers, wireless radio, webcam, and limelight (computer vision controller for detecting/tracking balls, hub, hanger, etc).

What we are working on still

I believe we have everything finished already. If anything, we have to finish mounting plugging everything together.

Thanks for reading. As always, we hoped you enjoy this. Follow us on Mastodon at @[email protected] and we will see you next time.

Status Update [4/4/2022]

Here is our second status update. It has been a bit since I posted one because I haven’t been to a build meeting since I got the blog back up until today.

What we got done

  • Mounted Shooter. The shooter is now on the robot. We currently do not have a reliable way of getting the shooter.
  • Fold up intake. As the intake reaches out beyond the robot perimeter, we had to work on a way to fold the intake up, but also to be able to lower it at the start of the match. This was mostly done already as we had built the intake with the ability to raise up and down easily.

What we are working on still

  • Programming. I do not know the status on this so I will see if we can get Carson, our lead developer, to give us an update.
  • Cargo delivery. We are currently working on a way to reliably get the ball to the shooter, as well as being able to store the ball between pickup and launcher.

What to get done still

  • Mount the electronics. We have not done ANY mounting of electronics, except for motors. Everything else is still strapped to the dev board.

Thanks for reading. As always, we hoped you enjoy this. Follow us on Mastodon at @[email protected] and we will see you next time.

Regionals day 1 [4/7/2022]

Today is the first of three days at the Huntsville City Regionals. We got our pit setup yesterday. Today we did some finishing touches on the robot. We will be updating this post throughout the day.

Pits

We got to see some cool pits. Here are some pictures.

Visits

We also had some teams come visit us.

(We are unable to recover this image for some reason).

Team pictures

We got quite a few pictures of our team.

Status Update [3/17/2022]

This is the our first status update for the ARS Robotics Program. I hope it goes well. I hope to improve these posts as time goes on.

What we got done.

  • Attaching motor for intake. After fiddling around with the intake assembly for a few days, we are finally got the motor mounted. Hopefully we are at a point where we can leave it alone and work on other stuff.
  • Work on flywheel assembly. I don’t know what we were working on with that, but I do know that we were assembling some frames for something and I believe it was for the flywheel. Sorry, no pictures. I didn’t think about getting any until after we left.

What we are working on:

  • We started working on designing our pit. I don’t think we finalized anything. However, we did decide on a basic concept. We are likely going to make out pit out of PVC piping for whatever reason with banners hanging of some of the sides and possibly the top. I’m not sure what the rest of the plan is.

What we need to work on still

  • Code. We need to get our code completed so we can do a test before the competition. I think we are currently waiting on getting everything built so we know how our code needs to function, and how we will do input.

I think that is all. Stay tuned for our next update. I plan on writing these each day that we have a build meeting, as well as for each competition we have. I guess we will see how long that happens.