2023 Week 3: Team Journal

Build

3 weeks into build season, our team has experienced its fair share of ups and downs while working towards building a competitive robot in this year’s Charged Up challenge. We’ve made significant progress in our efforts to create a swerve-type drivetrain, as our Electrical Team finished wiring up the CanBUS system; we now hope to test swerve more intensely in weeks to come. Our Build Team focused on testing the “over the bumper” intake, but ran into issues regarding spacing. We are hard at work to resolve the issue, as was our Design Team, which improved geometries in their CAD models to ensure such issues do not reoccur. Design also tested various other geometries/prototypes, giving our build team more data to work with in the future. 

Fabrication stressed the importance of learning by teaching many of our underclassmen how to operate the various machines in the build lab, including the lathe, router, and mill. Under the careful watch of our senior members, our younger members became proficient and interested in our machines, now able to aid the team further. Software made leaps and bounds with swerve drive, coding an operational product that can be tested in the weeks to go. On top of this, software investigated how April Tags could be of use to us during matches, as well as finalizing Scouting Application v1. Through feedback from the rest of our teammates, Scout App received overwhelming positive reviews, and we are excited to use the new and improved version during competitions. 

Business

This week, the Business team diligently prepared for a variety of upcoming events. Our annual Sponsor Night is right around the corner, and the team is hard at work getting ready. First, our newer members continued to work on creating updated team showcases, to represent all of  Nemesis’ efforts last year. These showcases are a window into our team for all members of the community. The logistics team worked on invitations for Sponsor Night and planning for the event. Additionally, we created some exciting new community outreach events. This weekend, we will hold an FLL Meet and Greet, where we will teach local parents about FIRST, and why they should consider starting an FLL team of their own. We also connected all interested parents to work together. This joining together will enable our community to create multiple new FLL teams. This is a new and exciting opportunity for us to continue to spread the FIRST mission throughout Robbinsville. 

This week, our Community Outreach subteam will work with the Trenton Urban Promise organization for an upcoming STEM event. Our team hopes to spread the FIRST message to an underserved community by building STEM kits with kids from the Trenton area. Our logistics team also worked on planning for our competitions, including the week 3 Robbinsville district event. They continued the search for transportation, meals, and hotels for our travel competitions later this season. Overall, this was another highly productive week for the Nemesis Business team and we are looking forward to another exciting season of building and learning.