Halfway through build season

Jan 19-21st

     We've been busy since our last blog. This year, we decided we needed to build a base quickly, knowing it may not be the final dimensions of our “real robot”. This robot would be a good base that we could mount other prototypes and systems to while we develop our real robot. Because at some point, we won’t want to talk about this anymore, we’ve decided to call this “Bruno bot” (we don’t talk about Bru-no-no-no). At the beginning of this meeting subsystem leads would go up to the TV and present their design review to the team. The goal for the design review is to make sure everyone has a good idea of what other subsystems within the team have been doing. The design review is a good way of making sure that our team is making progress and time stamping future plans. On Friday the 21st we were able to mount the intake to the “Bruno bot”. One of our team's sponsors, Kettering, joined us to talk to the team about future opportunities, encouraging Pearadox students to consider applying and attending Kettering, and they generously donated pizza to the team for dinner. It was really cool learning about Kettering's Co-op program because they have much to offer for young adults that want to pursue engineering in the near future. After dinner was over a couple of our team members gave the two representatives from Kettering a tour of our room. At the conclusion of the meeting, we had our 15-minute gearbox girls meeting that is open for anyone on the team to attend to. The initiative for this meeting is to create a close bond between each other from past experiences and to be able to get to know each other better. In this meeting in particular we talked about the important of “rejection quotas” (for example, keep applying to colleges until you get rejected to at least 3 of them) and a couple people shared some rejection stories from past experiences and how rejection was initially scary, but it ended up being a positive experience. 

Do you ever feel you're being watched by a giant Pear?

Sat Jan 21 - Weds Jan 26

   Coming into Saturdays meeting the technical side of the team building “Bruno” had a good understanding of what they wanted to have accomplished. As it seems everyone was very prepared to get their goals done with the amount of time, we spend on Saturday. Unfortunately, we realized due to some COVID cases that we would need to end up canceling our Saturday meeting and go virtual only for Tues and Weds. However, before leaving, we did get to see Bruno bot driving around and intaking game pieces
     Tuesday we held our design review virtually, and Tuesday and Wednesday we took the opportunity to do some CAD work and teach our Everybot crews how to program. One big decision was we decided that the frame dimensions for Bruno bot were going to be too small for our real robot, so we opted to grow our design by 2 inches and are now about 25" wide by 28" long. 

Fri Jan 28 and Sat Jan 29

On Friday we began meeting in person again. As we were happy with the speeds and driving we saw from Bruno base, we began constructing parts for our real frame (that's going to be 2 inches longer). Our chairman's group finished a first draft of their chairmans essay, and we got together a lot of parts to test an entire ball path (from intake to scoring) this weekend. The goal is to get this assembled and mounted onto Bruno bot in the coming days so that we have a robot that we can do some kind of practice and learn while we do a lot of manufacturing and assembly of our real practice bot. Bruno bot won't meet competition standards (it will have things like a permanently deployed intake), but it'll give our programmers and drive team something to work with. It was a good productive weekend, and our CAD is starting to look like a real robot! 

Also, our freshman and sophomores are building Everybots! If you're looking for a set of climber hooks, please reach out to us and we will happily cut and get them to you!