Today was the first meeting after the Waco district event, we have a routine that we do after every event. First we start with story time where the team shares funny, unique or surprising moments. Next we do a blameless postmortem where we talk about things that went well and things that went poorly. The blameless part is critical we are not looking to assign blame for failures but looking for ways we can improve our process.

If you read the recap post most of the items mentioned were covered there. Some new items in the went well column are food choices, team spirit, and pit setup quickly. Some new additions to the went poorly list trailer leaks, canman(mascot) needs more ice and robot cart needs new wheels.

CAD

The second joint of the arm is getting some rapid fire improvements before our next event. The second joint is currently powered by a winch(upwards) and gravity(downwards). This worked okay at the first event but had a few slight problems. We didn’t enjoy coming to a sudden stop and our arm raising outside of the robot. This got a few G204 fouls. Another problem happens when approaching a game piece the arm can swing out from momentum or be pushed up by the game piece.

This makes it slightly harder than it should be to quickly intake game pieces. So to fix these two problems we are changing the second joint of the arm to be driven by a chain on a dead axle. This also makes the arm slightly easier to control from programming’s perspective. The down side is that this adds more weight(that is decently high up) on the robot. So to balance it out we added a lightening pattern to the first stage arms.

The CAD sub team is also working on adding all of the pit fixes we did at Waco to the robot. We need to add the cone node deflector, top cover, battery strap and add a cube retaining strap to the intake. Thankfully our next event is week 4, we have time but that doesn’t mean we are going to slow down we want to get all these changes made this week to have more time to iterate on the next additions.