What’s Inside the Box? FIRST Power Up – a game full of power cubes, switches, scales, and a climb! Check out this year’s game animation:
It’s been a busy first week of our 2018 Build Season! Between wrestling with nuts and bolts in battles that require both coaches and students,
building field elements with mentors, and
building prototypes, Team 3238 has been busy!
Chassis has decided to pursue a design with chain rather than belts, giving the subsystems four more inches to work with between the wheel base.
The collector subsystem originally discussed using belts similar to those on our Steamworks robot, but decided to go with a more versatile and maneuverable system to allow for all cube orientations.
Our lifter subsystem originally planned to use a linear slide system similar to what we used during 2015 (a design we call Recycled Rush), but moved to a different design when they discovered that those specific slides wouldn’t be delivered until the final week of build! The same group of people is also working on our climbing subsystem, which may also be based on a previous year’s robot.
While the rest of the team has been designing and building prototypes, the electronics subsystem has been updating software, writing code for the plywood proto-chassis, and discussing how to write autonomous code and use vision processing to detect cubes while showing their new members the ropes.
We’re excited to see how FIRST Power Up turns out and hope you are too!