Team 980 has been clocking long hours the past few weeks getting the robot ready to ship. We’re almost there!

We passed on the pre-ship scrimmage Sunday in favor of focused assembly and test of the robot. Our dedicated group of students made great progress with the robot. Our kicker performs quite well. We improved our motor configuration for the ball roller. The electronics are neatly packaged on two lexan boards located behind the kicker. The front suspension is robust and will soften landings when going over the bumps. The robot is very modular and quite serviceable. We’ll remove the kicker and ball roller assemblies before shipping. We can fine-tune these mechanisms prior to our initial competition in Arizona (Mar 11-13). Our robot lifting mechanism design is preliminary, but we’ve got an innovative yet rather simple approach to get on the tower or hang from an elevated robot.

This week, we are meeting today (Monday) to get the crate loaded with the robot, cart, etc. (the FedEx pick-up is on Tuesday). We’ll take a couple days off and meet again on Thursday to lay-out plans for our post-ship activities. In order to have a practice robot, we’ll need to fabricate a frame, then attach the mechanisms and electronics we are allowed to withhold from shipping. If we assemble the frame this Saturday, we’ll have 10 days for practice driving, controls testing, and final tune-up for competition.

Team 980 thanks our partner, NEY, for hosting us in their new community center. We will are fortunate to have such a fine space for designing and building our robot. Over the next few weeks, we’ll continue to work with Team 2404 so they too have a very competitive robot for the Los Angeles Regional at the end of March.

Congrats to our students who have put in a terrific effort this year under challenging circumstances. The really fun part is just around the corner!!

It’s CRUNCH TIME! We’re meeting everyday from now until ship date (Feb. 23). That’s right, we’re a week-and-a-half from putting the robot in the crate, but we seem to have misplaced the robot!

Actually, the robot design details are nearly complete and more robot parts are showing up daily. We had an epiphany on kicker design: a lighter kicker makes the design much easier, cleaner and definitely safer. The electronics boards are ready for assembly and wiring. We’ve succeeded in communicating between the new driver station and robot controller. The controls team is anxious to get at crack at a functional robot. This weekend is going to be busy and hopefully productive.

Our meeting schedule remains 5:30 pm to 8:00 pm on school days. This holiday weekend (Sat – Mon) we will work from 10 am to 5 pm (or later) to get the robot built. We need to have our robot ready for the pre-ship scrimmage on Sunday Feb. 21 at Harvey-Mudd College. That means students need to be driving and operating the robot all day Sat. Feb. 20. The good news is we’ve put together a fairly simple design without sacrificing capability, a Team 980 trademark.

The Chairman’s submission is due next Thursday evening. We will review the draft essay and create the executive summary this weekend. We also need to get more photos and building footage to create the Chairman’s video.

Do you get the sense that we’re under the gun? Yes, this is FIRST – the hardest fun you’ll ever have!

See you soon and often!!

Team 980 has reached the half-way point of build season, which means we’re only about two weeks behind schedule!

Actually, we’ve made good progress in our robot design. Thanks to David Toyne (who was off in sub-tropical Iowa last week) we’ve got drawings for a very mass-efficient robot chassis. The base for our drive components and electronics will be built from 80/20 and the bumper frame will be 1″-square aluminum tube. The front two wheels are hinged with gas springs to serve as shock absorbers. The front and rear wheels are driven by timing belts that also serve as “tank treads” for crossing bumps and getting onto the platform. Our students have been experimenting with the kicker prototype with very encouraging results. We’re now looking at low-mass, effective design approaches to getting up onto the tower platform.

The software controls team has made great progress as well. We are controlling last year’s robot with the new drive station PC and updated firmware in the cRIO robot controller. New students have been learning the fundamentals of robot control: how the motors work, the end-to-end operation of the control systems and programming techniques. The “floor plan” for the robot control electronics has been started. This year’s robot has some tight packaging constraints, so properly configuring the electronics is quite a challenging task.

Thanks to the help of Steve Smith, Team 980 now has a well-organized build space. So the pace has definitely picked up. Our robot chassis base has been assembled, with more parts on their way. This week’s goal is to assemble the primary drive components and see how the robot negotiates the bumps. Assembly of the remaining robot hardware will continue through next week, so our controls and drive team get a crack at running the robot before the pre-ship scrimmage.

Team 980 meets Mon-Fri from 5:30 pm to 8:00 pm and on Saturday from 1:00 pm to 6:00 pm. Come join us at the NEY Center in Altadena and help create a terrific robot!

Team 980 now meets on weekdays (Mon-Fri) at 5:30 pm to 8:00 pm at the NEY Community Center (2662 Fair Oaks Ave, Altadena). We also meet there on Saturdays from 1 pm to 6 pm. We will work on a few Sundays between now and ship date as well. We will not meet on Super Bowl Sunday (Feb 7).

Week #2 Update:
Team 980 has settled on most of the key robot capabilities and design concepts. We plan to field a robust robot that can maneuver over bumps, control the ball and kick from any position on the field. We still are considering design options for elevating and/or suspending our robot in the finale. Prototype kickers will be going testing this week. Our drive system is based on our familiar 6-wheel drive with an energy-absorbing front suspension for driving over bumps. This next week will focus on chassis and drive system design and fabrication, ball control/kicker detailed design and electronics/software development. By the end of this week, we plan to control our 2009 robot with the new driver’s station and updated cRio firmware.

Our Team980.com website has undergone a remarkable transformation since kickoff. You may be reading this post on our news-feed on the site. The team calendar can be viewed on a dedicated page as well. Over the next four weeks, we will expand and organize the website content for award consideration along with our Chairman’s and Woodie Flowers Awards submissions due Feb 18.

We have a lot of challenges ahead in our last 30 days of build season, but we have a great group of students to meet them all. Now that we meet solely at NEY, we will working more closely with Team 2404. The TNT students arrive earlier in the day and in addition to working on their robot, are helping organize the build space for robot fabrication, assembly and testing. Lincoln Lumber has become a community partner with Team 2404 and are building some field elements: a tower, a goal and additional bump segments.

Team 980’s success depends on students participating in as many sessions as possible between now and ship date. Our key milestones ahead are listed below:

Thurs. Feb. 18 FIRST Awards submission deadline
Sun. Feb. 21 Pre-ship Scrimmage (Harvey-Mudd College)
Tues. Feb. 23 Robot Ship Date

See you at NEY!

Team 980 is meeting at NEY Community Center on Mon. Jan. 18 (Martin Luther King Day) from 4 pm to 7 pm (some of us will be there in the early afternoon). We then resume our regular schedule: Tues and Thurs at John Burroughs HS from 5 pm to 8 pm, Wed and Fri at NEY from 6 pm to 9 pm and Sat 1 pm to 6 pm, also at the NEY Community Center.

For those who have not yet joined us, there is still time to become a member of our robotics team. Please visit us!

We’ve made good progress with the robot design in Week 1. Our first prototype of the ball control roller showed we can easily possess a ball, even when driving backward! We now need to develop the ball shooter concept and decide on a drive system design. By next Sat, we should have our robot capabilities fully defined and design concepts well in hand.

Team 980 has a new website in development: www.team980.com has launched! Students interested in working on the website should come to at least one our NEY meetings this week. Excellent internet access on multiple computers available at NEY. Once we’ve decided on web-site content, students can continue to improve the site at home. The website needs to be complete by Feb 18 to be eligible for awards. We will also discuss the Chairman’s Award this week (also due on Feb 18).

See you this week!

Team 980 Outreach: On Saturday afternoon, Team 980 received a special visit by several Cub Scouts from Delphi Academy. They are FIRST Lego League members and likely future FRC participants! They came to interview engineers to earn activity awards towards their Webelos rank. Our engineering mentors enjoyed describing their experiences in product design and space exploration.

This is a new website being developed for Team 980 – The Thunderbots! Check back soon for updates.

Team 980 is meeting at the NEY Community Center  (2662 Fair Oak Ave, Altadena) on Saturdays from 1 pm to 6 pm.

Saturday meetings are our best days for making a lot of progress on the robot development, especially if you have a good turnout. Please eat lunch before arriving!!

We are not having a regular Team 980 meeting today (Fri. Jan. 15), although we are setting up our workspace this afternoon from 4 pm to ~7 pm.

Any help you can with setting up is appreciated. We will be moving tools, materials, and equipment from John Muir HS to the NEY Center.