Community Outreach (So Far) This Season

While our team is focused on designing, building, and programming the best possible robot for the season, we also want to make sure that we are encouraging participation in FIRST and STEM in general. This season, we’ve put greater emphasis on working with teams and students within our community to give them the opportunity to learn what we do in robotics and how they can get involved.

Chaboya Middle School

On October 14th, we hosted a technical robotics workshop for students interested in robotics. We had a group of students rotate through stations where they learned the programming and design fundamentals of robotics and were given the chance to drive our improved Freight Frenzy robot. A special thanks to Mr. Nguyen at Chaboya for letting us host the workshop in his classroom after school!

Shaunak talks to a couple of students about the different types of drivetrains in robotics.

Tom Matsumoto Elementary school

Amogh introduces the students to FIRST robotics and the things Omega does as a team.

This past Friday, October 28th, we were given the special opportunity to host an assembly for over 150 fifth and sixth graders at Tom Matsumoto Elementary School! Our team talked about FIRST robotics and the cool things we do as a robotics team in the mechanical—CAD, 3D printing, machining, robot iteration—and programming—computer vision, localization, and autonomous movement—fields. The students were especially interested in the connection between building robots and building legos. The students loved the demonstration of our robot as well. A special thanks to the principal, Ms. Frankina, and the 5th and 6th grade teachers for offering their time to let us speak to the students about robotics.

Students watch as we talk and demonstrate our Freight Frenzy robot.

Future outreach

Fortunately, we are not done with outreach for this season. We’re proud to have established great relationships with both Tom Matsumoto Elementary School and Chaboya Middle School so we’ll come back again this season to talk more about what we do in robotics and our progress. Even so, we are currently mentoring FTC 22040 Allstars R2 Robotics.

2022-2023 Power Play Kickoff

Tomorrow is the kickoff of the Power Play season. Last season we were faced with a big learning curve moving to back to in-person meetings with new leadership. And unfortunately, we were only able to participate in one tournament. However, we were still able to build a fully functional robot and develop our technical skills. We also participated in the planning committee of the Western Region Robotics Forum again, and we taught an Introduction to Java class.

This season, we have much bigger plans. With our design, building, and programming skills improved from last year, we plan to target a much earlier qualifier. Also, with our improved partnership with Allstars United, we are planning to mentor multiple FLL teams. We also have plans to set up introductory workshops in Tom Matsumoto Elementary School and Chaboya Middle School that will connect us with over 150 students.

2021 Offseason Plans

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.

2021-2022 Ultimate Goal Engineering Portfolio and Notebook

Our engineering portfolio is shown below and can be found here:

Our non-technical and technical engineering notebooks are below and can be found here and here (respectively).

Qualifier 2 – Nueva High School, San Mateo

Today our team attended our second qualifier at Nueva High School in San Mateo. We spent over 3 weeks revising our robot and preparing for this competition. Our last qualifier was successful, but we aimed to score even higher in this one.

We changed our robot slightly from the last model, exchanging the dead-axled arm to a virtual 4-bar in order to keep the block more steady. We also improved the auto to make it more reliable. These changes turned out very well, and we managed to get 2nd seed out of 16 teams! We also won the following awards:

• Think Award
• Inspire Award, 1st Runner Up

Our excellent binder won us a second award this season, and we are very proud of our progress. We hope to continue to make a very detailed and organized binder.

Qualifier 3 – Micron, San Jose

Today we participated in the qualifier held at Micron, San Jose. Compared to our second qualifier, we did not do as well as we hoped. During the few weeks leading up to the qualifier, we had adjusted our auto code to better our chances of scoring more points. However, our robot on multiple matches ran into the skybridge. Although with these issues, our robot performed fairly well. Our score for the qualification matches was 4-1, which allowed us to advance to the semifinals. We won both of the semifinal games which allowed us to continue to the finals.

Because of our hard work and efforts, we were able to bring home:

• Connect Award
• Inspire Award, 1st Runner Up
• Innovate Award, 1st Runner Up

Qualifier 3 Preparation (Meetings 47-53)

meeting 47

Date: 12/23/2019

Time: 3:30 – 6:30 pm

Attendance: Prakash, Aravind, Vishrut, Atul, Trinity, Afra, Josephine, Aditya

goals

• Finish the debrief of the San Mateo Qualifier

what was accomplished

• Completed the binder entry for the San Mateo Qualifier (previous)
• Discussed how we could improve, what went wrong, and what we did well
• We are going to take a break from robotics meetings for the holidays

reflection

• We were initially disappointed in our performance at the qualifier, but at the end of the day we actually got a lot farther relative to the previous qualifier (we were 2nd seed this time and runner-up for the Inspire Award) and we’re proud of how far we came
• Learning from our mistakes is the most important part of this process of thinking back on the competition — the season isn’t over yet and we still have lots of work to do in order to fix our robot.

Qualifier 2 Preparation (Meetings 41-46)

Meeting 41

Date: 11/25/2019

Time: 3:30 – 6:00

Attendance: Nidhir, Amogh, Aravind, Vishrut, Prakash, Josephine, Rebecca, Rohan, Vivaswat, Aditya, Atul, Afra, Amaan

Goals

• Have a short debrief about the qualifier.

what was accomplished

• We worked to document the previous qualifier.
• We were able to discuss how to improve things for future tournaments and meetings.

Other

• We documented a plan for what each subteam is going to do until the next qualifier, for example the mechanical team will have to build a drivetrain for code testing and upgrade our current robot.

reflection

• Putting our thoughts about the qualifier in a Problem – Solution – Urgency table greatly helped us organize our thoughts and prioritize what we needed to do next. (Rebecca)

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  Team members discuss what we did well at the Burlingame Qualifier and how we could improve.

Qualifier 1 – Burlingame High School

Today, we went to Burlingame High School and participated in our first qualifier of the Skystone season. This was the first ever qualifier for the majority of our team and we were extremely excited!

We did well in this qualifier despite the not yet updated robot. We went to this qualifier with our Tatooine robot design and did not expect to win anything, but instead went for the experience for the younger members of the team. We ended up bringing home an award!

We took home the think award for our excellent excellent, industrial scale engineering binder. Our detailed accounts of our meetings and outreach took much dedication, and we hope to keep up the good work with our binder and documentation.

Qualifier 1 Preparation (Meetings 13-40)

Meeting 13

Date: 9/18/2019

Time: 1:45 PM – 6:00 PM

Attendance: Nidhir, Vishrut, Aravind, Amaan, Amogh, Aditya, Josh, Afra, Trinity, Ananya, Ashley, Rohan, Prakash, Betty, Josephine

Goals

• Code: Begin programming and testing basic move methods. Begin teaching new members.
• Design/CAD: CAD practice and begin designing our two passthrough robot ideas, Virtual 4 bar and side mounted elevator. 
• Mechanical: Build the OX-01-H drivetrain
• WebDev/PR: Continue discussion/hopefully finalize new colors/branding standards (if needed), new logo, complete update of the website.
• Business: Begin sending out sponsorship letters/packets.
• Project Pick-up: Complete the high throughput intake and the main trash holding area. Continue work  on website. 

What was accomplished

• Programmers were able to install Android Studio and Java while creating a Git account, also getting access to the project files. (Amogh)

Mechanical

• We disassembled the entirety of the old drive train, sorting usable screws and bolts from unusable parts.
• Then, we started assembling the new drivetrain that fit the needs of the Skystone challenge. (Prakash)
• We were able to learn what to use and how to disassemble certain parts of the old drive train, since it was easier to use one thing instead of something else to disassemble certain parts. (Atul)

Programming

• We held sustainability lectures. (Vishrut)
• We set up code to generate motion profiles. (Vishrut)

design

• Looked at other teams’ robots and FRC robots with designs similar to those we were thinking of using.  (Vishrut) 
  • Passthrough designs: virtual four-bar and side-mounted elevator  (Vishrut)

other

• Finished the team roster and added in the last few remaining members
• We worked on sponsorship letters, and started to email some companies. (Afra)

notes

• Sometimes it gets very chaotic due to so many members being in one space, meaning that we aren’t progressing as fast as we’d like to. (Josephine)

reflection

• Programmers were able to get the assistance they needed to help complete the installation. We were able to understand the core principles of motion profiling, and the linear and iterative programs. (Amogh)

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  Members learning how to assemble parts and pieces onto the robot.

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  New members learning how to program.

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  Members designing a new merch logo and editing the website.