It’s week 3 of build season, and for our students that means … exams not robotics. So as you could expect, we haven’t made much progress. We’re starting to machine our drive and tool mechanisms, and aiming to have a fully assembled practice robot next week.
This week, we also began programming by starting the initial project code, creating subsystems, commands, and playing around with vision. Our one and only programming mentor is away on a work term all the way in sunny California (lucky him for not having to deal with all this snow) for the season, but thankfully we have some talented programming students who will be free to run wild for the season.
Now that our design is completed, we’re holding our design review session where our students present their subsystem design to some of our parents, alumni, and industry mentors. The design review session gives our students the opportunity to showcase all their work to industry professionals, and also get an outside perspective on our robot designs and processes, allowing for continuous improvement throughout the season. Inviting sponsor representatives to a formal design review session is also a good way to get your sponsors involved in your build season process. To give an example of what content we cover in our design review, we’ve included our slides from last year.
Since we’ve had a relatively uneventful week, we’re going to share some of our favourite build season blogs from some of our friends:
The first is JVN’s Build Blog where dishes on everything from Team 148's design process to “Top 9: 2019 Design Lies”.
Next, we have two of our fellow Compass Alliance teams 4911 and 4481 who have both been publishing build blogs this year.
Here's to hoping for a more productive and significantly less stressful Week 4!
