Service Projects, Robot Building, and an Instagram Shoutout?

This week was a little out of the ordinary, especially for us. Our school, unlike a lot of the schools in our area, had fall break this week. Awesome, right? No school and extra time to work on our robot! Exactly our thoughts, but we didn't get as much done in terms of the robot as we would have hoped, but we still have a boatload to tell you about.

Before the end of last season, we were asked by another club at our school if we would be able to build feminine product dispensers for the girl's bathrooms at our school. They didn't have the resources, but we took on the challenge right away! We've had a few brainstorming sessions over the past few months and we decided on a blueprint just last week. We are building these dispensers out of wood since we don't have the proper tools to work with sheet metal. Dimensions and materials down, we took our opportunity to get building this week. We didn't finish, but we have one dispenser built, painted, and just about ready to hang on the wall! This is such a fun service project for our team, and we think it will make an especially big impact for the girls at our school and for all the girls on our team. FIRST and FTC is all about helping the community and inspiring young innovators through robotics. Though our work may only benefit the lives of the students at our school, we still think the impact is beneficial to our community, no matter how small. Here are some pictures of us building this week.

Cutting out wood to the correct dimensions

Drilling in brackets to connect the pieces

Cutting out funky semicircles

Painting and finishing touches

Now, to the robot stuff. Like I said before, we didn't make as much progress as one would think when you're on a school break. That's not to say we made no progress and there's nothing to talk about, because there sure is! Remember last week when we were having trouble with the wheels on our drivetrain? You don't?! You should go back and read it, then! (https://ftc18094bbni.wixsite.com/website/post/week-2-of-building-drivetrain-brainstorming-and-game-pieces)

Anyways, the first thing we did when we got together to work this week was swap out the wheels for mecanum wheels. Luckily it worked and we can still make it over the barrier, but with a bit of a lower clearance, so we didn't have to resort to last-minute brainstorming and panic! We also completed the building part of our drivetrain. Yep, that means wheels are on, motors are attached, and chains are cut to the right lengths. We haven't finished programming it yet, so no testing has been done to make sure it really does work.

Attaching motors to our drivetrain frame

Putting the wheels back on to measure chain-links

Testing the different wheels we have for turning the carousel

Speaking of programming, we didn't do much with that this week. We had trouble connecting our control hub with the new driver hub we got this year, and then we tried to connect it to the phone we used last year, and we were still having problems. One of our coaches said there might be a fluke that we can work around to connect them for next time. Only time will tell.

We began building a bunch of the other components of our robot including a spinner for the carousel, a claw attached to a lift, and something spinny?!?! We don't quite have it all together yet, and, to be honest, it's just a bunch of ideas jumping around in our heads. As soon as we make some more progress on our robot (which should be soon!), we will include all the details here in our blog. Keep up with our weekly posts if you don't want to miss out.

We had another little surprise this week: REV Robotics posted our team for their Feature Friday. As a team, our social media presence hasn't been very good. We just use Instagram and have only been using it for 4 months. We are total newbies to social media plus FTC and we've been trying to post more often to keep you guys updated. This was such a big deal for our team (trust me, the Discord server blew up about 5 minutes after the post went out) and it really boosted our moral! Thank you REV Robotics!

If you don't already, please follow us on Instagram @batteriesnotincludedftc. We don't have a posting schedule on Instagram, so we post just about everything right as it's happening. This means you will get the most up-to-date information about our team and some sneak-peak pictures that we don't share on the blog!

We post on our blog every Sunday with everything that's been happening over the past week. Check our website every Sunday for new posts and updates!