First Official Practice of the Season

By Omar, Lin, Jayesh, Darshan, Ethan, Evan, Janavi, Max, and Tycho

Task: Pull ourselves together for the new season

At this practice, our goal was to get everybody familliar with this year's game, Velocity Vortex, and to brainstorm some ideas for this year's robot. Some organization also needed to be done in terms of parts (everything is everywhere and nowhere at the same time) and also in terms of this year's meeting structure. Last year was somewhat unfocused and chaotic and we need to get a better grasp of things.

Reflections

We managed to get a decent amount done today. Jayesh described our new meeting structure: we begin with a group discussion of what we'd be doing that day, then would separate and work, then around mid-meeting we'd eat some food and while doing so talk about what we've done, then separate again and continue working. Hopefully we're able to stick to this schedule.

Jayesh and I also made a small table of possible wheel base options, such as using either Mecanum wheels or returning to the omni-wheels of yore. Evan and Darshan disassembled the mountain from last year's field and put it outside near our tent. We discussed several things, such as some interesting rules about how our robot will not be able to grasp onto any part of the center structure, and therefore could not stop it from rotating by doing so. We also discussed League play, and it's advantages/disadvantages. A large weakness of ours is lack of testing, and these League meets would definitely let us get some more practice in before the big qualifiers.

Evan and Tycho both tried to explain designs for this year's robot that they'd thought up. Evan, by using some loopholes in the rules, designed the premise for a robot that would park itself right in front of our Corner Vortex, having with it at least two Particles, and would cycle them through the Vortex over and over again. Even though each Particle that goes through would only be worth a point, Evan argues that these will add up since his design will be quick at cycling. Tycho's idea focuses instead on the Center Vortex; he explained that his robot would have ball intakes on opposite sides of the robot so direction wouldn't matter (unlike last year's robot, Geb), and would have some sort of mechanism in the center of the robot that would shoot Particles up and through the Center Vortex. So far, most of us are aligning more on Tycho's side of the design wars, but Evan's persistence might win us over. Who knows.

One other thing Jayesh, Evan and I decided on (question mark?) is a general plan for this year's autonomous that we 100% need to work on to be successful: the robot will hit the beacon buttons, then move to the center of the field, hit the cap ball out of the center, then park in the center (not neccessarily fully). We thought this was realistically possible given the time that we have until competition.