We got a little behind in posting updates, but some students went through our meetingrecaps channel in slack to create some blurbs for our meetings since our last blog!

First things first though - we want to welcome and thank our new sponsors, Little STEM Academy! We did a demo with them a few weeks ago and had a blast showing off our robot to their kids

Jan 29th 
On the meeting of January 29th, Pearadox had a productive day. The ball transport subsystem successfully got their side panels CNCed and decided to gather more materials to use for the future. Both the freshmen and sophomore Every Bot groups added hooks to their respective bots so they can climb. Intake subsystem used and tested different ways to mount the intake on a robot. Programming started to work with a new coding system, and chairman has also started to work on the Woodie flower essay. Afterward, the Brilliant Black Builders meeting was held for 15 minutes. 
 
Feb 1st
A shorter meeting, but we still got a lot done. At the beginning of the meeting, all the subsystems went over their design reviews one by one, and Electrical spent some time assisting the rookies on both Every Bot teams.  

Feb 2nd 
Wednesday, February 2nd, was another productivity-filled meeting, as we moved some stuff around for better and easier access to tools, and repaired some of the climber holes. 

Feb 4th

Friday, February 4th, was off on a rocky start, but was an innovative meeting. We weren’t entirely sure that we’d have a meeting due to the weather and the wet roads. Fortunately, we did get to have a meeting! The subsystems made sure that their COTS parts were up to date. We also had a Gearbox Girls meeting after the initial meeting. 

Feb 5th
Saturday, February 5th, was an eventful day. Chairman connected over a call with iron plaid and reviewed the chairman’s essay after lunch. The entire cooperated and answered some Q and A questions. A Brilliant Black Builders meet was held after the meeting 

Feb 8th
Tuesday, February 8th, was a progressive meeting. The subsystems went over their design reviews towards the beginning of the meeting. Chairman reviewed the Woodie Flower essay one last time before submitting it. The subsystems worked hard and made some progress towards the robot. 

Feb 9th 
Wednesday, February 9th, was another progressive meeting. The base was sent to a welder early this week, and Chairman’s team worked on some video editor stuff and the end- design. 
 
 Feb 11th
Friday, February 11th was an eventful afternoon. The base got their drive train back, fully welded. Marketing started to paint their wonderful pit designs. Both Every Bot teams (freshmen and sophomore) tested out their robot functions. 

Feb 15th 
Tuesday, February 15th the team did a daily design review so that we can make sure that every component of the robot is adding up. Every subsystem hit the ground running because our goal was to have a functional robot. Ball transport subsystem got most of their pieces CNCed over the weekend and so they are ready to begin assembling. Ball transport referred to this meeting as being one of their most productive of the build season yet. 
Wednesday- February 16th 
Chairman’s worked on cutting characters and making sure everything in their essay made a good amount of sense before submitting it. Once all this was done, all the hard work that was put in by the chairman’s team finally submitted it one day before it was due!! The climber was able to get the rest of their parts machined and one of their stationary hooks for the practice bot, not “Bruno” is complete. Sophomore everybot worked on autonomous mode which can score and drive out the initial line. Both climber hooks broke but they are getting replaced. Ball tower a lot more parts were machined for practice robots and they started putting together the parts they already had. 
 
Feb 18th 
The climber is in the progress of building the main (moving) part of the climber. As for the stationary hooks. Intake got side plates and pneumatic mount plates cut on CNC. I also milled the side 2X1sAll that's left is the 1/4 aluminum gussets and PC arms. Should be done beginning of Saturday’s meeting. Should be able to assemble it tomorrow hopefully get it mounted soon but that requires nothing to go wrong. 000. Sophomore every bot fixed the stuff we broke earlier, and broke stuff to be fixed later. Shooter finished post-processing side plates which are now ready to be assembled. At the conclusion of the meeting, there was a gearbox girl meeting. 

Upcoming events
We have several things coming up! We hope to see you at one of them.
Mattress sale fundraiser - Sat Feb 26th from 10 AM - 5 PM
To raise some funds, we're tacking on to the dawson band mattress sale fundraiser. If you're in the market for a new mattress (or pillow, adjustable bases, massage chairs, convertible bean bag chairs apparently, or sheets or whatever) - mark your calendars for Feb 26th from 10 am - 5 pm. One day only! Just let them know that Pearadox Robotics referred you. It's been an expensive year and we hope to make some money from it https://facebook.com/events/s/annual-dawson-hs-band-mattress/442756743961987/
Open house / Inspection PEARfection - Feb 27th from 11 AM to 5 PM
 - come see our robot(s) and meet the team!
- local FRC teams are invited to our facility for mock inspections and practice on the field! We have a upper and lower hub, hangar, terminal, and a full field perimeter. Get some drive practice in!
Channelview Competition - March 12th and 13th
Come see us compete at Channelview High School. Matches are from 11-730 on Saturday March 12th and continue March 13th from 930-12. Playoffs and awards start at 1 PM. Watch our social media for our specific match times and details!
Pasadena Competition - March 25th and 26th
You can also watch us compete at San Jacinto College: Central Campus on Sat March 25th and Sun March 26th. Schedule will be the similar to the channelview competition. 

     We've been busy since our last blog. This year, we decided we needed to build a base quickly, knowing it may not be the final dimensions of our “real robot”. This robot would be a good base that we could mount other prototypes and systems to while we develop our real robot. Because at some point, we won’t want to talk about this anymore, we’ve decided to call this “Bruno bot” (we don’t talk about Bru-no-no-no). At the beginning of this meeting subsystem leads would go up to the TV and present their design review to the team. The goal for the design review is to make sure everyone has a good idea of what other subsystems within the team have been doing. The design review is a good way of making sure that our team is making progress and time stamping future plans. On Friday the 21st we were able to mount the intake to the “Bruno bot”. One of our team's sponsors, Kettering, joined us to talk to the team about future opportunities, encouraging Pearadox students to consider applying and attending Kettering, and they generously donated pizza to the team for dinner. It was really cool learning about Kettering's Co-op program because they have much to offer for young adults that want to pursue engineering in the near future. After dinner was over a couple of our team members gave the two representatives from Kettering a tour of our room. At the conclusion of the meeting, we had our 15-minute gearbox girls meeting that is open for anyone on the team to attend to. The initiative for this meeting is to create a close bond between each other from past experiences and to be able to get to know each other better. In this meeting in particular we talked about the important of “rejection quotas” (for example, keep applying to colleges until you get rejected to at least 3 of them) and a couple people shared some rejection stories from past experiences and how rejection was initially scary, but it ended up being a positive experience. 

   Coming into Saturdays meeting the technical side of the team building “Bruno” had a good understanding of what they wanted to have accomplished. As it seems everyone was very prepared to get their goals done with the amount of time, we spend on Saturday. Unfortunately, we realized due to some COVID cases that we would need to end up canceling our Saturday meeting and go virtual only for Tues and Weds. However, before leaving, we did get to see Bruno bot driving around and intaking game pieces
     Tuesday we held our design review virtually, and Tuesday and Wednesday we took the opportunity to do some CAD work and teach our Everybot crews how to program. One big decision was we decided that the frame dimensions for Bruno bot were going to be too small for our real robot, so we opted to grow our design by 2 inches and are now about 25" wide by 28" long. 

On Friday we began meeting in person again. As we were happy with the speeds and driving we saw from Bruno base, we began constructing parts for our real frame (that's going to be 2 inches longer). Our chairman's group finished a first draft of their chairmans essay, and we got together a lot of parts to test an entire ball path (from intake to scoring) this weekend. The goal is to get this assembled and mounted onto Bruno bot in the coming days so that we have a robot that we can do some kind of practice and learn while we do a lot of manufacturing and assembly of our real practice bot. Bruno bot won't meet competition standards (it will have things like a permanently deployed intake), but it'll give our programmers and drive team something to work with. It was a good productive weekend, and our CAD is starting to look like a real robot! 

Also, our freshman and sophomores are building Everybots! If you're looking for a set of climber hooks, please reach out to us and we will happily cut and get them to you!

On January 8th, Pearadox had it's first day back after an offseason of rookie training and outreach events. Kickoff is the day where FRC teams all over the world watch the game animation for this years' challenge.

After the game animation ends, our team broke up into groups to go through the rules, discuss different strategies, all the things we think a robot can do, and start figuring out what we want our robot to accomplish in a match. There's a lot of interest and intrigue in a very challenging climbing aspect of the new game, where there are 2 rungs that are higher than you can reach from the ground. 

The best way for us to try to rank high at a competition and win it is by winning matches (of course) but also earning other "Ranking Points" by scoring 20 game pieces or by having our alliance of 3 robots earn 16 hanging points. If we can get to the high or traversal rung, then we only need to rely on 1 other robot on our alliance to climb. 

At the end of the day Saturday, we determined that we need to do some prototyping and absorb the game some more before we make any commitments to what our robot should do.

We're also fortunate to have had several alumni come back for kickoff. They share a little bit about their experience on the team, what they're doing now, and then help with building the new field with some parent volunteers so our current team members can focus on the robot. 

Students began sketching out and prototyping ideas they have. We quickly realized that if we want to be able to complete the Cargo Bonus by ourselves, we not only need a good way to score the cargo balls, but collect them as well. 

​We also started making some progress on building field elements.

On Tuesdays, we do a design review to keep all the students on our large team updated as to the other things going on on the team. As this was only our 3rd meeting of the season, it was more focused on setting what the requirements are for subsystems and priorities for the team. We determined our priority order should be: ​

• Small base optimized for half field distances ​
  • If the base is narrow, we can fit 2 robots closer to the fender ​
  • Fast enough to conceivably do the quintent​
  • Helps with squeezing in on the hangar last minute
• No unintended cargo get in/on our robot (no "catching" cargo)​
• Fast floor intake (critical for reducing cycle time, or even picking up opponent cargo for defense) ​
• upper hub fender shot (best chance of winning, and can solo cargo bonus) ​
• mid rung climber (3 robot hanging RP) ​
• (if we get all of the above then) auton that can do a quintent (or at least 4 and pray for a HP shot) so we can do one less cycle for the cargo bonus...which gives you more time for a  ​
• (if we get the above then) high rung climb for a 2 robot hanging RP ​

Desirements (ie not requirements, but if we can get it for "free" as part of our other designs than great):

• Low-rung climber (if we have 2 other robots that can only do mid rung) ​
• Traversal rung (if we have an alliance with 1 no-climber and 1 low-only climber) ​
• Outtake cargo (to feed an elite shooter) ​​

We continued prototyping and got to a good stopping point on our field build. We have team members busy on numerous things - from prototypes of subsystems, to preparing awards submissions, and teaching new team members how to build a robot while keeping our parts and tools organized. On Monday we had a meeting to discuss how we might fit our subsystems together. By the end of the day Monday, we had accomplished the following:

• assembled a base (25" x 28") with a gearbox geared for ~12 feet per second. We got electronics mounted on it as well; we should hopefully have it driving at our Wednesday meeting
• Our sophomores (plus some freshman we pulled from our very large number of freshman) assembled a Kit Of Parts (KOP) base for our "sophomore" everybot...which we obviously need to rename. The base is fully assembled and we're excited about the Everybot reveal!
• Our freshman assembled most of a KOP base for our "freshman" Everybot. There's a little bit left to do.
• We determined to have our freshman and sophomore build their own Everybots as their top priority to ensure they get some hands on experience this year to make up for the huge lack of hands on training from nearly 2 years off from meetings due to COVID. 
• We've assembled the 3 major field elements: a Hub (the large goal in the center of the field), the Hangar (where robots hang at the end of the match), and the Terminal (where human players can put game pieces back onto the field of play). If you're in the Houston area and want to practice at our field, reach out to us! Huge thank you to our parents and alumni that have been coming to meetings to make this possible and allow our students to focus on the robot.
• We got a couple of prototypes together for collecting the game piece, storing the game piece, and scoring the game piece
• Our chairmans team is making a lot of progress on their short answers and essay for our awards submission due Feb 17th
• We also had students volunteering at the local FTC competition - students helped to set up the field on Friday and volunteered in numerous capacities on Saturday

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                  
Pearland, TX (December 3, 2019) – Preparations for the Pearland Annual Christmas Parade ​
 
One of our team’s major December projects is the Pearland Annual Christmas parade. We’ve participated in this same parade for 2 years already, and we are excited to kick off our third with the “Toyland” theme! Our students love the process of making the float because it is one of the rare times when students from any subsystem or specialty can work together on the same project.  
 
An example of that would be our small but mighty programming team, who helped in creating a program for both our 2018 and 2019 robot to run a loop where the arms could go up and down repeatedly. It added a fun and creative touch to our float that really made us stand out as a robotics team! Our 2018 robot, Scorpearion, we had holding an old game piece made to look like a present. Our 2019 robot, Waste Management, holds another old game piece which resembles a giant ornament, putting it onto our Christmas tree adorned with Pearadox decorations. Aside from the robots, our floats featured huge figures of both a nutcracker and a wind-up pear, the former to fit both the holiday and toy theme, and the latter to provide a cameo of our team mascot, Peary.  
 
On top of utilizing every Monday and Saturday meeting leading up to the parade for preparations, we met at the house of one of our Pearadox alumni, Jared, to add all the components onto the float. It was a great team building experience, and 2 very productive nights! Finishing up all the preparations of our float during daylight on Saturday December 7, the day of the parade, we had finished with an amazing product that featured contributions from everyone on our team. 
 
 
A small team of Pearadox students get together at an alumni’s house for float decorating!  

​Pearadox Robotics Team 5414 is a robotics team that competes annually in FRC competitions. Besides competing in robotics, our student members also mentor junior robotics clubs and teams, earn internships and scholarships, and host government representatives and business organizations that tour our facilities. We partner with Pearland Independent School District. 
 
Pearland, Texas | www.pearadox5414.weebly.com ​

This Friday and Saturday (6/28/2019, 6/29/2019), Pearadox, FRC team 5414 participated in TRI, the Texas Robotics Invitational hosted by Spectrum, FRC team 3847, at Strake Jesuit. The Texas Robotics Invitational is a great offseason event that serves as both an introduction to FRC for the incoming rookies and a way for current team members to branch out.

The first part of the event consisted of the All-Girl Drive Team Tournament. This gave our Chairman’s team’s girls a chance to experience a world they normally would not be able to participate in due to their usual stations at the pits presenting to judges. Here, the girls formed a Drive Team by taking on the roles of Driver, Operator, Human Player, and Technician for four fast-paced, but fulfilling matches, despite their lack of experience with participating in matches. In fact, Pearadox often uses offseason matches as a chance to get more non-Drive Team members to experience being on the Drive Team or as a way to immerse new rookies in the matches by offering them a more direct perspective using the role of Technician.

After lunch, qualification matches—matches held to determine the robots’ ranks based on the total ranking points accumulated by completing certain tasks in each math—were held, put on hold at around 6:30, before continuing Saturday. During these matches, many members of Pearadox got to switch through the roles of Operator, Human Player, Technician, and Drive Coach. These rotations gave students a good idea of the duties they would undertake if they choose to aim for a certain role on Drive Team the next year.

Simultaneously, two Pearadox students stepped up to create scouting schedules and lead the team, especially the incoming rookies, who would be expected to be active scouters in the upcoming year, in watching and recording each team’s performance using apps designed by Pearadox on kindles. This data was crucial for Alliance Selections, which took place just before lunch on Saturday. Although Pearadox was not an Alliance Captain during Alliance Selections, the consolidated from scouting proved to be useful when our representative, prospected Strategy Lead for next year, advised our teammates on the remaining selections.

Competitions are quite fun in their own right, but at TRI, we were graced with an extra celebration party on Friday evening for the students of different teams to mingle, socialize, and have fun. Spectrum provided a variety of food, from Cici’s Pizza to Cane’s chicken and a variety of entertainment, including but not limited to dodgeball, Super Smash Bros, Miniature Texas Cornhole, and Jenga. Our team members enjoyed themselves greatly and forged new connections with various members of other teams.
​
Overall, TRI was very rewarding, as we were not only able to expose our rookies to the various exciting aspects of FRC, but were also able to see unexpected leadership skills and technical abilities of certain members shine when put under the foreign pressure of being on Drive Team or having to lead in scouting. As always, Pearadox continues to grow and evolve with each competition, with each of our members constantly striving for an improved pearformance.

FIRST Robotics Team Pearadox 5414 had a fantastic weekend at the Channelview District competition in Channelview, TX. Out of 36 teams, Pearadox earned a spot as the third seed alliance captain and made third place, forcing a tiebreaker in the semifinals. Additionally, their unique and consistent Backflip-Climb and robot design earned them the Excellence in Engineering award, that “Celebrates an elegant and advantageous machine feature,” as described by FIRST. Pearadox also exhibited Gracious Professionalism® by helping five other teams at the Channelview District Competition, getting them through inspection and preparing their robot for the arena. Next, Pearadox will be competing at the FIRST in Texas District Greenville Event from March 21-23. ​

The Pearadox 5414 Team taking a group picture with their awards at the FIRST in Texas Channelview District Competition ​

The students gave me these blog posts a few meetings ago, but I neglected to post them! I'll have to find a way to streamline the process for future blogs. I've combined the two into one.

Pearland, TX (January 5, 2019) - Update to the Robotics Room
 
On January 2, Pearadox 5414 was finally able to move into the newly renovated room. Though the room isn’t fully completed, it was amazing to see what improvements were made to the space. The room now includes a big tool and storage area, as well as a Chairman’s room and a computer room. Though seeing the new room was delightful, we still had to transfer all our materials from our temporary small room(s), to the new space and organize. The task was strenuous, but we were able to move a lot of our materials, prepping for the start of the new build season. We are so excited to see what wonders the new room will give to our 2019 robotics journey, and we can’t wait till build season starts. 

Pearland, TX (January 5th 2018) – 2019 FIRST Kickoff
           
     With 2018 having ended, the Pearadox robotics team started off the new year strong, being gathered to prepare for the 2019 kickoff of the most recent challenge from FIRST. 30 plus members arrived at 8 am to prepare for the reveal of the game, accompanied by 15 mentors and numerous alumni. Four other teams were also in attendance (7410, 5908, 6547, and 5932), in total 150 individuals being present for the exciting unveiling of the newest provocation from FIRST. Before all the attending parties were bombarded with details of the activity, one of two guest speakers were introduced. Kris Davis, a mechanical engineer for NASA, presented the students of Pearadox with an introduction on topics related to designing materials capable of withstanding the harsh conditions of space, this subject reflecting the topic of the newest FIRST challenge; deep space.
     After this, the livestream of the game was displayed, students furiously taking notes as the game was revealed. The game manual was also released, detailing everything about the space-themed challenge, from field pieces to human player actions and the restrictions placed on competing robots. Members individually then split off into groups, went over guidelines, discussed strategic elements that would come into play during a match, everyone making sure that they thoroughly knew the rules and understood the game. A short lunch break followed, the second guest speaker, Sarah Brubaker, discussing afterwards the importance of scholarships and specifically about the upcoming opportunities for junior and senior Pearadox members - High School Aerospace scholars and the Rodeo Scholarship. Group discussions about observations and ideas about the game were also held, a simulation involving students in place of the robots also being done to better help the students conceptualize how the matches would look like. By the end of the day, with a firm grasp of the rules of the game, the team began to brainstorm ideas, theorize about possible paths that could be taken with the robot, and even build parts of the field needed in order to fully realize the possibilities and challenges that FIRST had presented. In the upcoming weeks, Pearadox will face said difficulties head on with the determination and strength provided by its students and mentors, in order to accomplish their goals and start off the new year successfully. 

                                                                                                                         ###
Pearadox Robotics Team 5414 is a robotics team that competes annually in FRC competitions. Besides competing in robotics, our student members also mentor junior robotics clubs and teams, earn internships and scholarships, and host government representatives and business organizations that tour our facilities. We partner with Pearland Independent School District.

NOTE: This blog post was written by Andrew, a Pearadox mentor.

What a weekend! We had 4 teams attend kickoff with Pearadox at Turner High School for our annual Pear Up! event. We do this because we hope that we can share our experience with analyzing a game with teams that may have a lot of new team members or rookies, or are looking to strengthen the start to their season. We also had people from the IEEE Galveston bay Section Women in Engineering group, someone speak about the Rodeo Scholarship and the High School Aerospace Scholars, and someone talk about their day job of designing space suits!

Some initial thoughts after we spent all day Saturday reading the rules and discussing robot tasks and strategy, and much of Sunday doing the same + building field:

• Scores will be pretty low compared to past years (absolute max score is 154).
  • We estimate seeing playoff scores range roughly 55-85 at district events and 80-120 at the district championship. It'll be interesting to come back and see how far off we were!
• We think the way to win will be to have an alliance that can do as many Hatch Panels (HPLs) and Cargo ( C) as possible
  • There are 12 total bays available at the lowest level. With HPLs being worth 2 points and C worth 3, that's 60 points available by focusing at the lowest level.
• Beyond winning, to get the extra ranking point, teams have to either complete a Rocket or get 15 points in the Habitat Zone
  • To complete a rocket by yourself, you need to be able to do a total of 12 cycles (6 HPL and 6 C).
  • You can't get 15 points by yourself, but you can get 12 by getting to level 3 so that only 1 partner has to get on the ramp, and another could keep scoring
  • If you have 2 robots that can get to level 2, then with all 3 robots you can get the RP. This means that no one can keep scoring HPLS and C though.
• The new sandstorm mode is interesting
  • We think some teams will feel good about just slapping a camera on and thinking you can complete a task. Driving with only a First Person View will be hard! Do you have last years robot? Your driver could start practicing now!
  • Up to 5 HPLs could be scored during the sandstorm period
    • This is unlikely for most matches - getting two hatch panels requires you to do something like score a pre-loaded one in 3 seconds, then you have 6 seconds to go grab the next one from the loading station, and 6 seconds to go score it.
    • While there's no explicit auton "bonus" or "multiplier", every hatch panel scored essentially gives you 3 free points from the preloaded C
    • If you put NULL Hatch Panels on, you potentially limit your max score
      • This is especially true if you can only do the low level Hatches, or your alliance can only do low level HPLs and C
    • If you don't put NULL Hatch panel on, you potentially have between 3 and 8 Cargo rolling around your half of the field on the floor
    • We currently think it's more likely that teams opt to allow C to clutter the field vs limit the points available from HPLs, except in the cases where more of the alliance is better at C than HPLs. This may not be the best decision for teams to make however
      • Smart play actually requires you to estimate how many HPLs and C your alliance can score - you want to optimize to score cargo more than optimize to scote HPLs to get more points/cycle. Stated another way - unless all three teams can only do low level, and all three teams are confident they can combine for more than all 12 cargo and and 6 hatch panels by match end - NULL hatch panels may be the way to go. 
• We came up with a skill-tree for the robot on Saturday. I have expanded on it below. Where are you going to be spending your resources at? 

It was also awesome to have alumni out. Some of our students are writing a blog about the actual kickoff event - but I just wanted to share how rewarding it is as a mentor to see our alumni come back for kickoff to help out. They cut a lot of lumber for us and gave us a huge leg up. Also using our new CNC router and track saw helped a ton too! We've already got a rocket and Levels 2 and 3 built!