2016 Week 1: Build Journal

Finally! The long awaited build season is upon us. All of us here at Nemesis are excited and already hard at work. We kicked off the week with a full team game analysis meeting where we held enthusiastic discussions on how to approach this year’s challenge-- FIRST Stronghold! After hours of brainstorming and sketching our design ideas, we picked ideas and started prototyping. Shooting the boulders and overcoming outer work defensive field elements were our priorities. Subteams were assigned to prototype several methods to achieve these tasks. In this past week, we have successfully accomplished prototyping several subsystems for our robot, such as the intake, shooting, traversing difficult terrain, and even overcoming some of the most difficult obstacles.

Both catapult style and flywheel powered shooters were designed earlier in the week and have been refined and are now consistently reaching our desired target, the high goal of the castle. Our underclassmen were heavily involved in the creation and development of these prototypes, and we are proud to see them getting so involved this early in their FIRST Robotics career.  As far as getting our ball into our shooter, our intake prototypes are able to bring in the ball quite effectively. We modified our old kit-bots with pneumatic wheels to stagger our way across the low field elements. We are looking to improve our drivetrain in this upcoming week by designing our very own custom rhino tank drive! Subteams have been working on creating an elevator rotating hook mechanism to actuate the more complex field defenses. These designs still require further improvement, but more on that next week. We are excited to combine our prototypes and turn them into a honed machine that will hopefully lead us into an exciting competition season.