Sensational 7 Robotics

The best day of any new season is when the field elements arrive! We spent all afternoon setting up the field in our garage. We are most excited about the carousel element of Freight Frenzy. So many ideas are bouncing around in our heads for how we are go make sure we accomplish the carousel part of the challenge. A rubber duck will be sitting on the carousel (picture on the right), and our robot will have to spin the carousel to deposit the rubber duck onto the field…during the autonomous period. Our programmers really have their work cut out for them! The carousel will be an important way to score points later in the driving portion as well so it is essential that we think of and design an effective and efficient solution!

If you are interested in watching the video of this year’s challenge click on the link below…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6lX12idAf8&t=50s

Every month we’d like to highlight one of our sponsors. This month we highlight Sommet Strategies!

Do you own or work for a business that is poised for growth?

Do you need help building a financial and operations infrastructure?

Sommet Strategies will work with you as an outsourced CFO team to make sure your business is ready to grow and thrive!

We are so thankful the people at Sommet Strategies recognize the importance of a STEM education through FIRST by supporting Sensational 7 Robotics!

This week our challenge was to design the best way to raise our existing chassis by 20% in order to drive over obstacles. We broke into two teams, sketched our design on paper and presented it to our coaches. We then took ideas from both teams to design a whole new, raised chassis.

Our design team took to Autodesk Fusion 360, our CAD program, and started sketching our new design.

The programming broke off and practiced Java programming. We are learning a lot this summer!

This summer our coaches are presenting us with mini-challenges to stretch our brains and get us to “think on paper”. Hopefully this will help us create an awesome engineering notebook for the Freight Frenzy season.

Our challenge: Create a structure that will hold a wiffle ball and write and/or draw instructions for someone who is building it in another location.

The hardest part of this challenge was writing instructions detailed enough for someone to follow. We learned how important it is to be detailed, neat, organized, and thorough when writing instructions. We found we had an easier time telling and showing how to do something, but explaining in writing was quite difficult. We hope to improve this skill this summer because clear written explanations are an important part of our engineering notebook.

After our very successful workshops last summer, the Covid-19 numbers skyrocketed across the country. We decided to put robotics meetings on hold and focus on learning Fusion 360 and Java programming independently.

One year later, we are ready to get the team back together again. A few of our team members have moved on to other adventures, but we have added a new member who we are excited to work with!

The build team spent our first meeting re-familiarizing themselves with the Tetrix parts by building a push bot.

The programming team worked on completing simple programming challenges by writing code in block coding. They were able to program the robot to navigate an obstacles using distance sensors.