VEX/FRC Pre-season Blog

September 10th, 2019

School is back in session and with that has come the official start of the Vex season for team 52677. Between trying to wrap our heads around Sig-Figs to describing points in 3D space, the first month of school is under our belts, and so is the first two weeks of robotics club meetings. This year our club has decided to meet two days each week - one day for FRC and the other for Vex - and overall here are the highlights from said meetings...

Vex:

  • Introduced 2019-20 game to Vex members and started brainstorming ideas for potential robot designs
  • Have yet to make official teams due to the comings and goings of new members but plan to in the upcoming week
  • Introduced the different elements of the Bearbotics robotics club to new members, said elements including software, mechanical, strategy, and overall club structure
  • Took apart old robots (rip 8 bar) to help give new members a better understanding of vex mechanics
  • Are still working on ordering v5 parts to hopefully use in the current season

FRC:

  • Turned on old Smokey XII to discover that is has survived it's summer in storage and is in fact still working
  • Plan to test ye' old Smokey XII next FRC club meeting to see how it's swerve drive has held up after three competitions, multiple "accidental" rammings, and the summer months
  • Brought summer project items back to school and have put faithful Goodie back into storage on it's respected shelf
  • Have resumed progress on completing projects for our sponsor, Echo, and hope to complete soon
  • Have officially declared that we, as a software team, from here on out are going to use Minecraft to program our robot in all current FRC seasons (for the memes)
    • The club vice president informed us that we are not switching to Lab View (even though the club president is all for it) and because of this have chosen Minecraft as an alternative
      • All memes aside, we will not be using Lab View or Minecraft to code our robot we will continue to use C++ as our coding language for all current and future FRC robots.

With still four months to go until FRC kick off and a mere 2 months until our Vex Competition, our upcoming weeks are to be filled with robot designing, testing, as well as strategizing and keeping our up eligibility because it is only the 4th week of school. Here's to many more robots to come, and a great Vex season to all of our fellow teams. May your autonomous paths always score you no less than seven cubes.

September 24th, 2019

Today was our second vex meeting with teams. Teams primarily focused on consolidating their robot deigns and most got a start on their chassis. A few were even able to test code and now have a solid drive base to add on mechanisms to play the game. Team Captains also have started teaching new members different vex skills such as how to work with certain mechanical elements, how to code in Robot C, and how to organize a strategy for their teams and this year's game.

September 25th, 2019

After a busy summer for the team, we have gotten to the first fundraiser of the season!!! We held our first fundraiser at the Lake Zurich Culver's by selling 50/50 raffle tickets and asking customers to mention us at the counter to give us a percentage of the sales at the restaurant. We also demoed Smokey 12. After 3 hours of advertising our fundraiser and selling raffle tickets at Culver's we made a total of $300+ just off raffle tickets and a total of $tbd of the register. Thank you to all the students who helped get the sale, thank you to the customers for helping us out with their sales, and last but not least thank you to the Bearbotics Parent Group for helping us set up this fundraiser without you this wouldn't have been possible. We can't wait to see what you do with Marketing team in the future!!!

October 23, 2019

This week we've continued to build our robots for our Vex Regional at Batavia High School. Things are starting to take shape for most teams with the drive trains set, teams are able to start building mechanisms and start testing. Also some game pieces were shipped in and now we can be to scale with mechanism when testing. This week for FRC we started discussing on how we can prepare for the 2020 season with what we have left of the off season and we also had our first leadership meeting of the year. A project we've begun to work on is our new scouting app. We will be designing a scouting app for the 2021 season and possibly available for infinite recharge. Thanks for reading next week will have a special blog entry on the 28th of November.