First 2024-2025 Meeting

By Aarav, Anuhya, Sol, Elias, Jai, Krish, Nalin, Georgia, Ren, and Fernando

Today marked the first full program robotics meeting of the Into the Deep season. We had about 20 new recruits come into the Dojo for the very first time, and we had returning members from other sister teams. We started the meeting by going over the season reveal, talking about the basic rules, and as a whole team around 35 of us started ideating robot and subsystem ideas. We discussed with the new recruits about the specific important parts of this Season. Most importantly, we talked with the new members about Gracious Professionalism and the core values of FIRST robotics.

After a full group discussion, the new recruits split up into different teams based on their interests. We had two main divisions, one for coding and one for build and design. As two separate groups, we had socratic discussions and Iron reign started teaching foundational skills. In the build and design section, we talked about how to initialize the design process and we started drawing out ideas on a white board. Later on, we discussed basic building skills like how to use simple materials and parts such as rev-rails and hex nuts. After learning and discussing the build and design section split into two subunits and started playing around and applying the skills they learned. They started prototyping subsystems such as linear slides and basic ways to access the samples in the submersible.

On the other hand, with the code section, they learned about github and source control, specifically how to commit, push, and pull requests. They learned about servos and motors and how they work and the basics to coding them. Finally, they discussed an overview of the interactions between the driver station, the control/expansion hubs, and Android Studio on their development machines, with a brief foray into FTC Dashboard and RoadRunner. Overall, we helped new recruits dip their toes into the basics of robotics and helped them start building a foundational base of knowledge depending on what they were interested in.