Preseason

We started the preseason on September 30th this year. This is when we got our delivery of 4 swerve drive wheels and components, 12 kraken X60s, 8 new batteries, a new RoboRio, a new PDH, lots of wires and CTR sensors. All this new equipment will help us during the season to create a great robot with the next generation technologies. The team learned how to assemble the components. During the same week Jacob (Captain) and Warren (Mentor) started to create the vision of our new battery charging cart. They built this cart out of 2x4’s and plywood. This cart was then painted in our signature green color. The cart can hold up to 16 batteries and charge them all at once. Then Jacob milled the table top out of a pine tree, he cut, milled, planned, stained and varnished this table top with a waterfall edge for an amazing looking cart. We started the 2nd week of our preseason by the room redesign. Jeniffer (Main Mentor) started with a vision, and design. In 2 weeks was able to turn the vision into reality for the team. By installing a pegboard along the walls to organize our tools. Tools were sorted though, and triaged. Many things were moved around and removed from the room, like the lego robotics items that we no longer participate in. New cabinets and work areas were installed into the room utilizing every square foot of the room for the optimal set up. Without Jennifer our room would still be an utter disaster. We also had our first Meeting for our members, we described what actually happens in a robotics team. We talked about safety, and committees that we wanted to be part of. We started week 3 off by delivering the battery cart to the school, thanks to Jenifer for the transport. We had a meeting for members to help out in organizing the room, organized committees and talk safety. An electrical panel was cut to fix the new base we would use in the new season. We were lucky enought to have the electrical mentor from La Tech come and help wire the new base. It took 2 days to wire the base fully. Programmers had a workshop on how to code a motor, it went well. Programmers had multiple meetings with Karina (programing mentor), Warren (mentor) and Nor (programing mentor), they went through some swerve drive basics, programming workshops for Java. During that time Jennifer and some students organized the room a bit more. Adding a sheet of pegboard to the cart to make it fully functional. The pegboard was mostly organized and tools were filtered through again. Organizing sockets, tapes, wheels, etc. During week 5 and 6 we had Souly come back to give a soldering workshop to our team, learning why we soldier and how to do it properly. Every member that participated in this workshop gained large skills. THere wass also a multi meter workshop that was given at the end of the week again by Souly. He was kind enough to invite us to a workshop tour. Jennfier, William and Jacob (mentor and captains) were showed around their amazing workshop and shown how their team does robotics. Week 7 was the last week of robotics before Christmas break. There was a programming workshop once again, a meeting for all the mentors and captains to all get onto the same page. And the last organization of the room was quickly done. We planned out how kickoff day would go to start the week 1 of our season off. Week 8 starts christmas break has now begun, The website was created by Jacob and his father (Warren, mentor) THis has taken them 4 weeks to create with the last 2 weeks trying to narrow down all the small things they wanted to be perfect. We took time to get social media on a schedule so we post regularly. We have also started to create these blog styles of what we have been doing here in robotics.

Next year 2024, it was definitely better but not there yet. We made a really nice CRC robot that we spent so much time building, coding, and practising. Not to mention that the team grew to about 15 members. Our first competition of the year was CRC. We did not just do the robot this year. We created a website, a video, tutorial even making a kiosk and having costumes. The theme that we chose at CRC was Toy Story, we had a kiosk group that designed and worked very hard to create these pieces of design. Our robot barely broke during this competition which we were very impressed about but, of course, it’s not high speed like FRC. In CRC we made it to the semifinals and finished overall in 12th place in the whole competition including our website, kiosk, costumes, video, tutorial, and robot scores. Not too bad we all had so much fun the whole time. Then we had FRC, well this was 7 days after the CRC. We also had not started building it before CRC, so we had 5 days to build, code and practise the robot. And it was March break the day after so what else would we do then load everything up? We brought it to Jacob and Warren’s house. We built the whole robot in Jacob’s garage. A huge shout out goes to Jacob, William, Nicholas and Charles for spending their march break in my garage building this robot, with the help from our mentors Olivier (from RTX), Warren (From CAE) and Jennifer. Code created with help from Warren and Carlos (mentors). There was absolutely no practice. We built it in 5 days, finishing the day before competition.