Robotics Review Week #1

Kick-Off

On January 7th, the Buchanan Bird Brains huddled together to start off their 19th FRC season. Our team along with thousands of other FIRST® Robotics Competition teams around the world came together to watch the official release of the new FRC game for the 2023 season. This year’s game, “Charged Up” is an electric game where competing alliances use their robots to bring energy into their alliance’s community. The cone and cube game pieces are placed on different level nodes. Human players are playing a bigger part of this year’s challenge as cones and cubes can be received through slides and portals in the alliance’s substations. In the final minutes of the match robots have to dock or engage with their charge station by balancing on it. After learning about this year’s game, the Bird Brains got straight to work reviewing the new game manual and brainstorming rough ideas for our upcoming build season.

Progress on ST

As we start up the new season, ST (Science and Technology) has been hard at work prototyping subsystems for the robot and consistently communicating between subgroups to meet their weekly targets. Individually, each subgroup has been busy coming up with ideas for this year’s challenge. CAD (Computer Aided Design) started the week by brainstorming arm and gripper designs to be able to move the game pieces. Meanwhile, Programming got to work on tuning the limelight to the new April Tag codes for this year’s game play. Our Fabrication team, with Austin Rodriguez producing parts on our CNC Mill, has been working hard to manufacture the drive base. Members in electronics finished up training in soldering, with the help of a recent alumna- Genie Lee. Finally, Strategy has been working together with Programming to create a scouting app that will make it easier to obtain and record match scores and team stats. With close to 50% of our team being Freshmen, the mentors are very excited to see all the students being productive and energized with ideas. 

What IR has been working on

While ST has been prototyping ideas for the new robot, F-IR (our business side) began to hatch out initiatives for the upcoming year. Students started working on the Impact Award (previously Chairman’s) questions along with brainstorming ideas for the Impact Presentation and Video. This award is very special to our team and we hope to create a great product to showcase our sustainability efforts and all that our team does in the community.

Meanwhile, our individual subgroups also got busy. Finance, with our newly appointed Director (Katelyn Weibert), has been busy planning Open House and sending out very deserving thank you letters to our sponsors. Our media members began working on getting b-roll of week 1 activities in the shop as well as designing the 2023 season team shirts. Finally, Outreach is finalizing the updated manual for our Workshop in a Box initiative that we are hoping to mail out to schools and other FRC teams.

One week down, plenty more to go!

Plenty of hard work went into the first week of the build season. Something to look forward to: Merchandise drop! We’ve got some exciting new merchandise that will be going on sale in the next couple of weeks so stay tuned!