Ultimate goal Season recap
Although our team had to battle with coronavirus lockdowns in our area, we were still successful in winning the Think Award at the Fremont Qualifier on February 13. This season was hard for everyone on our team. In person meetings with the team were almost entirely non-existent, making communication and collaboration much harder. Despite this, our team was able to capitalize on the online platform by taking part in effective outreach. We participated the Western Region Robotics Forum and creating a website to teach the basics of Java and FTC code. We were able to reach almost 400 people online. We also had plans to work with Allstars United Education Foundation to teach robotics to younger kids in our community. We were able to design a minibot kit to shit to elementary and middle school students to introduce them to robotics as well as planning a local FTC league in our community. Though both those things did not get implemented due to COVID-19 and the ensuing lockdowns. We also had the chance to help out a new local team FTC Artemis who we mentored and still keep in touch with right now.
Although outreach was our strong-suit, our team was still able to design and build our most ambitious first-iteration robot thanks to our former co-captains. But on the online platform, we could only do so much. A lot of our work was pushed away from members who did not have much experience with robotics to the ones who already did. After the Fremont Qualifier we made a team decision to focus on sustaining our team for future years instead of trying to complete the Ultimate Goal season. We look to come back next season more motivated then ever to get back to the FTC World Championships like we were preparing for just one year ago.
sustainability
Our team’s current focus is sustainability. The purpose of sustainability is to give members the technical and non-technical skills they need to participate on the team. This is because we do not want a very uneven distribution of work and skills on the team, and we want everyone to make meaningful contributions to the team. Not doing sustainability can be a problem because then only two or three of our most experienced people would actually have the skills necessary to work on the robot. This can leave the rest of the team on the sidelines. This is our current schedule:
- Admin Sustainability: This includes everything related to non-technical work on the team. It focuses on maintaining our treasury, website, outreach, and engineering notebooks. We have a meeting on this on 3/20.
- Programming Sustainability: This includes the basics of Java as well as learning how to use FTC SDK, the Java library that is used for FTC programming. Meetings will take place on Saturdays from 4-5 after 3/20.
- Mechanical Sustainability: This includes learning robot designs and how to use Fusion 360 to CAD a robot. These meetings take place on Wednesdays from 2:15 to 3:00.
Sustainability will end on Saturday, May 15.
Summer Plans & Timeline
This summer we have plans to design, build, and program a new robot based roughly around the 2018-2019 Rover Ruckus game with a few adjustments. We ideally plan to have a fully functional and tested robot before the season kickoff. Below is the major and development process timeline of events we plan to adhere to.
Major timeline of events
- In person meetings to begin on Sunday, June 27th.
- Adapt standard meeting schedule once school begins on August 10th
- Complete the off season robot by September 5th.
Development process & timeline
- Step 1: Brainstorming (Complete by Thursday, June 17th)
- Define objectives
- Listing ideas for subassemblies
- Step 2: Design and Draw (Complete by Thursday, June 24th)
- Step 3: Analysis (Complete by Sunday, June 27th)
- Taking everyone’s ideas and compiling a final list of components & subassemblies
- Prototyping: Assign members to prototype the design
- Step 4: CAD (Complete by Thursday, July 29th)
- Complete hardware code & auto paths
- Assemble a BOM by August 1st and order parts as soon as possible
- Step 5: Build (Complete by Sunday, August 29th)
- Step 6: Testing & Redesign
We will continue to flesh out our plan with more specific details.
Omega Robotics 