Wait.. It Works??? [Week 5]

Yep. You read that title right. Things are starting to come together here at Woodrow. After testing the lift and attaching the intake, our robot is actually starting to look like, well, a robot. The mechanical team has been working tirelessly to bring this vital system to life, and it sure has shown. We have already begun to get the two components to work together as we temporarily wired them up to see if they even worked in the first place (spoiler alert: they work wonderfully).

Meanwhile, the computer engineering team is making great headway with our robot's code. This year, we're also trying a new way to control our robot. In the past, we've been using standard Xbox controllers for both the driver and the operator (the operator focuses on the robot systems, no driving required). This year, however, we are experimenting with a different kind of controller. Courtesy of our mentor and yours truly, the media team, we have created a custom systems board (featured above). Obviously, it's still in development, but it works and shows lots of promise!

We also finally busted out the FRC field today, primarily to test the different heights our lift will be taking our intake. We've had these really, really heavy field components lying around since the later half of Week 1, just collecting dust in the hallway. So today was a great day to finally break in (without breaking) the field. So far, so good!

To add to the incredible amount of work done this week, our Girl Scouts camp has been completely sold out, and the crew in charge of running that beast were off today, getting some final training for the camp at the facility we'll be hosting the event at.

Back at home, we ran an FTC (the little robots) scrimmage today, with all three of SEM's teams and all three of our own FTC teams. A lot of much needed progress and learning was awarded to all six teams, and just in time for the regional competition.

And the best of all, we managed to turn in our FRC essays Thursday with thirty minutes to spare (surprisingly, that's the fastest we've ever turned in our essays). For those of you who's new to FRC, or FIRST in general, there are 2 major essays to write: 1) the Woodie Flowers Award, where we enter our very best mentor to go against other team's mentors, and 2) The Chairman's Award, which looks at every aspect of a team, but the team's outreach is what is mostly checked (the more impact a team's outreach, the better). Winning the Chairman's Award (or the Woodie Flowers Award, for that matter) gives a team a huge boost in points to get to the Championship in Houston. So, now all we do is wait until our next competition.

Well, that's all for today. We'll see you next week here on our website blog!

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The 5242 Media team will keep you up to date on progress here, on our website, with weekly updates.