Today, the team worked on a prototype of the intake/collection system.  Elijah designed the flaps in OnShape and Caleb adjusted them to be longer.  The team used a drill to simulate the motor and ran several tests to see if the flaps were able to control the discs properly.   Here's Nathan and Brandon testing the updated Ring Shooter Prototype.  The motor speed has been set to 60% and the shooter itself is mounted on a stationary frame.

  The goal of this meeting was to build a test OpMode for the Mechanical/Engineering team to use with the prototype shooter.  They wanted to be able to change the motor speed in increments of +/- 5 so that they could perform various tests with the launcher. Nathan created a TeleOp OpMode and wrote the program while sharing his screen over the Discord video channel.  He used the opportunity to show Charlie how to map functions to the controller buttons and talked about some best practices like putting an empty "repeat while" loop after the button presses.  This eliminates the risk that the user holds the button down and the OpMode continuously changes the speed. In addition to using the bumpers for +5 or -5 motor speed, Nathan assigned discrete values of 0, 25, 50, 75, and 100 to various controller buttons.  That way, the testers won't need to press the button over-and-over to get to some of the more extreme values. Nathan also helped troubleshoot an issue relate...

Great progress with the ring shooter prototype!  

Coach Jeff passed out "Home Programming Kits" to each of the two programmers.  Each kit contains a control hub, expansion hub, one DC motor, servo, battery, on/off switch, a set of two phones, and a variety of power and communication cables.  This will allow the programming team to do programming at home and do some basic testing. Nathan demonstrated how to set up a new OpMode using blocks.  He also demonstrated how to create or update a configuration on the phone and showed how the names in the configuration are automatically accessible in the code.  By the end of the meeting, Charlie had a good idea of how to get started working on programming tutorials to familiarize himself with the different components.  Team Members present: Nathan, Charlie

New member, Brandon, dropped by HQ this morning to do a training exercise. He learned a little bit about what's under the hood of an FTC robot by taking last year's test robot apart. This season he'd like to learn more about the different drive trains and construct his own.  Destructicon! Old Test Robot

Tonight we worked on our launcher prototype. We made some discs out of the foam flooring material for the playing field. Then we ran tests varying the width/angle of the chute and how far back the disc were loaded. The discs shot a lot farther than expected! We measured the distance the discs travelled and recorded our results.  Team Members present:  Elijah, Nathan, Joshua, Caleb, Shelby, Brandon, Charlie

 This was our first official team meeting. We brainstormed ideas and layout concepts.  Team Members present: Elijah, Nathan, Josh, Caleb, Shelby, Brandon, Charlie