For each week of build season, we will be publishing department updates that summarize the work each of our departments have completed in the previous week. Below, each department head has written a short summary of their department's achievements.
Build and Design
During kickoff, our Build and Design team opted for small subdivisions of people, in order to promote ideation, which eventually convened into a large group discussion of what we had hoped to achieve. We left this meeting with a good general idea of our priorities and a vision for what our mechanisms would look like. Sequentially, we began prototyping for essentially all aspects of the game while emphasizing prototyping progress for our highest priority items. Furthermore, we had produced various 3D printed mounts before the season started which assisted our progress by allowing for easy tensioning for belts and mounting for motors.
Software
The Software department hit the ground running to kick off the 2020 build season! By employing a new organizational structure of splitting the department into three sub-departments — robot code, control systems and electrical — we have been able to divide and conquer a multitude of tasks. Although the robot hasn’t been constructed yet, there is still plenty to be done. In the control systems subdepartment, major strides have been made developing vision systems that can track on-field vision targets, which will soon be used in conjunction with localization and autonomous paths to allow our robot to rack up points. The robot code subdepartment has also been hard at work, with an emphasis on utilizing raspberry pi computers with our vision processing frameworks and writing out new wrappers and interfaces. Although there hasn’t been quite as much to keep electrical busy, they have worked on wiring speed controllers and imaging our electronic equipment to electrical work will run smoothly in the coming weeks. The week was concluded with a conglomeration of the whole department to assess progress and set new goals for the week to come. We have had an amazing first week, and are looking forward to what’s to come!
Business and Outreach
This past week, the Business and Outreach department focused on our Chairman’s award submission—which includes an essay, video, supplemental questions, and presentation—to tell the story of Team 2485’s impact on our local and global communities. We plan to finish our essay and supplemental submissions within the next week, and have already begun our video and presentation outlines. This week we also began the process for naming our robot. After sending out a form for robot name suggestions to our team, we have already received a plethora of responses and plan to have our robot named by the end of the week.