Halfway Through The PyroTech Build Season

It all started at kick off on January 4th... We went to East Carolina University and worked with Team 2642, the Pitt Pirates to run a Human Player Game (HPG) based on the new game “Aerial Assist.”  We used office chairs, pool noodles, and exercise balls for our HPG. This was the first time we had ever done the HPG away from Dorton Arena and assisted another team.

After Kick Off we had very intense strategy meetings then moved on to our first proof of concepts.  We spent most of our time during Week 1 trying out new ideas to see what worked or didn’t.  We were holding off on true prototypes until we had more ideas of what the materials actually could do.

Our team is using an Agile approach to build season this year with the hope that we will have a more finished robot earlier in the build season.  Given that, each Saturday the team gets together to set all the goals we wish to accomplish for each week looking ahead at the overall goals for build season.  The thought is to ‘fail faster’.  Find out what doesn’t work quickly so we don’t spend extra time on something that we won’t use later.

We worked on:

• The Plow
• The Plow is sort of a bulldozer type thing for moving the ball around the field and pushing it into the low goal
• Here is an early version, but it’s already really improved
• Electrical
• We worked on putting together our electrical board
• Pneumatic Shooter
• Baskets for catching
• The “WIS”  or Wheel Intake System
• Our picker upper type prototype

Week two we mostly turned proofs of concepts that were working into prototypes and continued to work on more Chairmans documentation. Items due before bag and tag.

 

We have:

• Team Essay
• Short Answers
• Business Plan

 

We must finish all of these while building a robot to compete with that isn’t just a toaster (a robot that can move around but can’t do anything else)!

Week three we worked on:

WIS (Wheel Intake System)

• CIS (Chopstick Intake System)
• Plow
• Electrical
• Chassis
• Mecanum wheels
• Pneumatics

  

It is now week four and we are starting to hit our panic button, or at least we should be! We have a demo at Paragon this upcoming Friday which we hope to bring a functioning robot to. (the snow is interfering with our building time!)