We are extremely proud of Anyssa, the newest Pearadox Dean's List Finalist! This picture captures exactly where you will find Anyssa at any competition when our robot is not on the field. She is a powerhouse of capability and intellect. She serves as a role model to her teammates as well as young students in our community. She is a well deserving recipient of the Lone Star Central Regional Dean's List Finalist Award. She now qualifies to compete for this award at the World Championship level in Houston!
#proud #powerhouse #capability #intellect #girlpowered #womeninstem#pearland #texas #rolemodel #finalist #omgrobots
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today we had pre inspection and our open house. A couple of quick notes from Andrew:
- we had more teams show up than anticipated. 6 teams and us. Thanks to everyone that came! - dont assume teams will know what to bring for pre inspection. Flyers next year should say to bring the lock out form, and bring a laptop and joysticks if they want a full pre-inspection - we're fortunate to have both Kevin and Lyndon around. I know inspections take awhile, but I dont feel like I planned enough time between starting the inspection process and opening the doors to the community and sponsors. Kevin and Lyndon probably spent 3 hrs going through the inspections. Fortunately, disco and awty had practice bots so they didnt care. Maybe next year have sign up slots? -I think making it an event maybe made teams more likely to get pre-inspected. I think its beneficial to be pre-inspected. I know it slightly adjusted our game plan to hopefully get us out on the field sooner. -Having teams all come to one place to get pre inspected hopefully made lives easier for our local lead inspectors. -I really liked having extra teams there as we opened the doors to the community, but it may have been too busy. We may break this up into two separate events next year. Unfortunately I got busy and didn't share our students' blog posts, so we get a double post today.
WEEK 4 Week four has passed, and Pearadox is hunkering down for the start of crunch time and the end of build season. Our team has been very occupied with assembling parts of the robot together to prepare to send off to be water jetted or welded, and non-technical parts of the team are preparing for the sound of competition season coming around the corner. On Tuesday, we were quite busy, with members from the team visiting the Microsoft store in Baybrook Mall to present to members and the public about our team and to secure a potential partnership for the coming years. While that was occurring, memebers at the facility where building parts to the robot and programming, while also having to discuss with multiple tour groups containing 8th graders stopping by our room about STEM, and the advantages of Pearadox. It was quite busy, and a great experience for team members to rack up on public speaking and public outreach. Base has milled and put together the competition frame of the robot, which has been sent off to be welded by our sponsors. Programming has been occupied fixing the PCM of one of our practice bots, doing PID tuning, and as well exploring future programming languages to use later in the future. The collector team has been occupied with conceptualizing a smaller static intake for use, while the manipulator team has been assembling a claw mechanism, and has mounted/assembled the parts that were sent to waterjet earlier in the week. Milling cuts are being made on the arm. Chairmans has finished main editing of the essay and short answers, and is committing final revisions and outside readings to ensure everything is good before submitting. The business team has finished the rough SARs for the submission and diagrams; revising is occurring. Imagery is also setting into high gear, with shirt designs, buttons, and an ambitious pit design being made for this year. We can’t wait to reveal that when it is competition time! Team Pearadox is now entering the final weeks of build season, and with that, we expect to be able to have a robot prepared for competition by bag day. Until next time! P.S. If you haven’t already, check out our great new video here. Enjoy! WEEK 5 Its week five, and Pearadox has been occupied in constructing parts/assembling them on our robot to be prepared for bag day. We had a guest team, team 6645, at our facility during the weekend; it was a great time for both teams to see what can be done working together, and we assisted their robot construction. Base has been occupied making competition gearboxes and wheels, and is assembling the competition base parts bit by bit. Information leading up to final creations of each robot subsystem is being recorded, so that it may be placed in the teams tech binder for future robotics members to look back upon previous team designs. Programming has been occupied placing encoders on the practice robot, and designing rough autonomous modes that could be used in the future. They have been also occupied on refining PID loops, which will come in handy for moving the robot around in autonomous more precisely. The manipulator subsystem has been occupied in testing out the design they created, and are currently making a new claw for the current claw manipulator that will be used to grab cubes. The collector subsystem has been occupied in prototyping on a new, low-profile collector to rapidly collect cubes and allow the claw manipulator to work in unison with it. The electrical team has been occupied on making electrical boards so that everything can be wired neatly and be easier to maintain during competitions. The chairmans team has submitted the chairmans essay and short answers after many weeks of toiling, and is now moving on to preparing for presentations at competitions and doing public relations projects to help spread the Pearadox name. Business team has finished for the most part their short answers and statistics, and expect to finish on time for the submission deadline all revised materials. With the end of build season looming, Pearadox rushes to make the deadline on time. While we may have progressed farther than before, we know the road to success at competitions is only just beginning. Until next update! Week 3:
Week three has passed, and Pearadox has been busy with attempting to reach the week 3 deadline set of a functioning version of the robot. Although we did not make the deadline, we have a functioning base and we are finalizing designs for the robot, along with assembly of our manipulator starting. We’ve been very busy and over the weekend, we hosted Tomball Robotics’ team and assisted them with their robot construction. We also gave them various tools and taught them how to operate them, so they can be used for future years and assist them greatly in their robot building. Base has been occupied finalizing final specifications for the base so material can be prepared/milled and later sent off to be welded and put together by our sponsors. They have also been cading the base together with bumpers to test specifications and finalize final image of base. Programming is continuing the rough program, along with tuning PID loops that would be used in this year’s robot. The collector team has been finalizing prototypes after extensive testing, and is finalizing mounting with the base. The lifting team is busy with designs and is currently looking at an elevator mechanism to lift the cubes. Chairmans has been updating the essay and is nearly done with new material that needs to be added with the Chairmans essay. They have also been finalizing rough drafts for the short answers and are currently being revised. Business has been finishing its rough drafts for the business plan and short answers for this year, and is beginning revising/finalization of parts of the business plan. While we may have not reached our goal, Pearadox has been accelerating farther than before with the designs and progress of building the robot. Until next update! Week one has passed, and plenty has occurred in the length of a week! Pearadox has been occupied with continuing robot design iterations, and with starting rough prototypes for the robot. The field components necessary to test and practice with have been fully constructed thanks to the hard work of our mentors/parents and students. Base has successfully achieved its objective of having a functional prototype base, and is currently testing different wheels configurations and limits on this year’s field. Programming has made a rough robot program for the prototype base, and is currently expanding on that programming to increase efficiency. Our collector team has been occupied viewing different possible collector methods and is busy prototyping the designs. The lifting team is currently building wooden mechanisms to lift the cubes, and might become a separate mechanism with the collector all together depending on later designs. Chairmans is already revising last year’s essay, with rough short answers already revised from last year’s essay and short answers. Business is currently working submission short answers for the Entrepreneurship Award, and has already been occupied with calculating this year’s available budget for the business plan. Right now we feel like we're further ahead than in past years, but building the field and coming up with concepts is the easy part...now for the hard part of building, testing and iterating on them. I didn't get a chance to update at the end of the day yesterday, but a blog post was written, so I will include both of them below Day 1Today, Pearadox hosted its most successful annual kickoff event for the unveiling of the new FRC game for the year: POWER UP. We had the recently formed team from Tomball, T3, 3rd year teams Gear Knights and Spartans, 2nd year teams Alloy Obsession and Flaming Metal, and veteran team Discobots as guests in our kickoff event. We were very excited for when this new challenge was revealed, and if you haven’t seen it yet, you can check it out here. With our guest teams, we viewed the live stream and the rest of the day was used to dissect and discuss the challenge and various strategies that could be used to answer this year’s challenge. By the time the day ended, we had discussed of the massive importance scales and shuttling cubes have on the game, and everyone left excited of the weeks to come in build season answering the challenge and the strategies discussed. Our team has gone straight to constructing the field elements, so that robot practice and prototyping may be done earlier. Finalization of our priorities and strategies, along with commencement in prototype ideas will be occurring this week. Everything looks bright and fun for Pearadox once again, and we can’t wait for what else the year has awaiting us. Until next time! Day 2It’s been one day, but it sure feels longer! Today, Pearadox has done some important preliminary steps on the road to building the competition robot. Thanks to the hard work of our students and mentors/parents, we have the field marked, and have parts for field elements cut and ready to be assembled. We think that this year all 3 robots on a playoff alliance should be attempting offense maneuvers - either scoring in the scale, maintaining ownership of our switch, turning off the opponents switch, or scoring in the vault. We thinking that scoring in the vault and potentially scoring in the switch could be done reasonably well without having to build a very complex robot, which could lead to great matches! We also think that a robot that can either lift two robots, or climb and take one robot with them above the 12" height while being able to score in the scales will be a very high seeding robot. We also think that a robot that focuses only on scoring cubes in the switches (near or far) quickly and reliably will be a very desirable robot, but may not seed as well to become a captain.
The team has decided that our strategy will be to place cubes in the scale (even at the highest configuration of 6ft), collect cubes in any orientation, and determine how to best ensure the ranking point for "Facing the boss". We also have set a goal to have a functioning version of the robot by the end of week 3. Base subsystem has accomplished a rough prototype design of a 6-wheel tank type drive with four omni-wheels and 2 traction wheels. metal has been cut and is ready to assemble at our Tuesday meeting, and we have a goal of a fully functional prototype base by the end of the build week. Our programming team has started to work with the new Java programming libraries for this year, and is testing out code using last year’s robot for practice. Our collector team has started to analyze and design different designs that could be used to collect the cubes from the ground in any orientation. Chairmans is alive and kicking, and is currently busy revising and adding in new content to the executive essay and short answers, which we plan to finish ahead of the submission deadline. Finally, business is also looking at what needs to be readjusted in the business plan. As the sun sets and the day ends, Pearadox has had a great 2nd day, and we sure can’t wait to have our final product ready and see all of the work to come bear fruit. Until next week! Weak 2 and 3 have passed and Pearadox has been working diligently in order to complete our objectives at hand. Our CADing team has been busy cading up the parts of our robot so they can be ready to be machined and welded by our sponsors. The base subsystem has been finalizing our teams base, opting to go for an "octocanum" that we may switch back to butterfly. Electrical has been very busy finding room to place electronics and vital parts in our crammed robot spacing and made a vertical mounting board to help make management of the electrical parts easier to maintain and make room for our other mechanisms (especially fuel!). Programming has made great strides, using command base Java programming to make vision-tracking software a viable resource for our autonomous modes being made and to assist the drivers in maneuvering the robot during the competition. The gear and shooting subsystem are moving towards final iterations of their prototypes for implementation/adjust for robot spacing and to be caded for our flight bot. Chairmans is also working diligently to finish the final iteration of the executive essay and short answers ahead of the submission deadline, and are nearly done accomplishing that. Our business team has also been occupied as they have an upcoming deadline to finish the business plan for this year and be ready to present it for our upcoming regionals. Awtybots came over to our facilities and they practiced with their bot on our field. We’ve been busy and hope all the other teams are doing well on their creations for this year’s challenge. Until next week!
Week one has passed, and in that week, Pearadox has made great strides in our work. We have finished constructing field elements and marking out our field for practicing our future robot on, thanks to hard work and dedication from our team members and mentors/parents. The team has finalized the strategy for our team and has identified the main objectives our robot will attempt to address: climbing, collecting and placing gears on the peg, and high goal autonomous shooting. Our base subsystem has completed a prototype butterfly drive for testing, and our programming team is continuing command base Java programming, already making code to test for driving and for the new base. We've also been hard at work starting on vision, with all the lessons learned from last year. Our gear subsystem is developing a mechanism to pick up gears from the ground and to retrieve gears from the loading station, while our shooting subsystem is prototyping a low profile high goal shooter. Chairmans is back and busy completing the rough draft of the executive essay and short answers to finish ahead of the submission deadline, while our business team is updating and refining our business plans. So far, we have had a good week here at Pearadox and we can’t wait to see our final product and efforts come to fruition. We should have some more pictures and videos to share soon too, but you can always view them at https://pearadox5414.smugmug.com/Build-Seasons/2017-STEAMworks. Until next week!
This past Saturday, team Pearadox hosted their annual kickoff event for the unveiling of the new FRC game for the year, STEAMWORKS. We had the 2nd year team Juggerbots and the recently formed team from Magonlia, Flaming Metal come over as guests in our kickoff event. We were excited when we saw this new challenge revealed, and in case you haven’t seen it yet, you can check it out here. On Saturday with our guest teams, we viewed the live stream and for the rest of the day dissected and discussed the challenge and different strategies that could be potentially used to answer this year’s challenge. By the time the day ended, all of us left excited of the challenge that awaited during build season and a couple of strategies we wanted to follow. On Sunday, the team went straight into constructing field elements to be able to practice with the robot built later and we finalized our priorities and strategy that the team wanted for this year’s robot. So far, everything is looking bright for Pearadox, and we can’t wait to see what else the year has in store! Until next time!
The team has been hopping to work this week, preparing for our upcoming Lone Star Regional in Houston. Firstly, the team received a very special visit from the robotics bunny that had the entire team test their hide and seek skills by hiding eggs all over our facility. The manipulator team has been working hard after the Alamo regional to make our robot be able to cross the Chival De Fries defense. They have decided on a final design and are just waiting to attach it to the robot this weekend. The programming team has finished getting vision for the drive team and having been working on different Autonomous options. The base team has been working on getting a camera above the field to help our drive team see over the obstacles. Furthermore, they have also updated our cart for the robot and adding a new handle to push the cart, a shelf to hold the controllers, and some sick flame decals. The awards team has been hard at work improving the mascot costumes and spirit items in the pit. We hope that everyone had an Eggcelent Easter and comes to support their team at the upcoming Lonestar regional April 7th-9th.
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