FIRST PowerUp is officially here, and Team Dave is already hard at work! Our season started off with the Waterloo Kickoff event at Woodland Christian High School on January 6th. A few of our experienced team mentors lead seminars in the hours leading up to the big reveal. Once the game was released, we broke into groups to read the rules and get acquainted with the game. Before long, we came back together as a team to discuss strategy and how we wanted to play the game.
The next day, we met at the University of Waterloo to consider robot design ideas and make a plan for build season. Mentors and experienced students lead small groups to brainstorm combinations of mechanisms before we came back together to share our ideas and decide on a design.
The rest of the week has been prototype after prototype! We’re continuously iterating and re-iterating to find the designs that work best so we can finalize them in the CAD of the robot. The design team will be hard at work this upcoming week putting the robot together in Solidworks while the mechanical and electrical teams will keep on prototyping until sheet metal arrives!
Meanwhile, the awards team has begun the season with a blistering start, writing the entire first draft of the Chairman’s as well as completing the first revision! We’re excited to keep working on it and begin the video and presentation scripts as week 2 rolls in. We’ve also chosen our Woodie Flowers nominee and are planning to start writing the submission in the near future.
On a final note, we held a quick scouting meeting this afternoon to discuss which metrics and data points we want to scout at competitions this year. Plus, we’ve started working on our database and also started brainstorming ways to organize a possibly updated scouting sheet.
All in all, our first week was as successful as any! We’re loving this game and are excited to see where next week brings us! To keep up with us daily, you can follow us on Instagram at @team3683!
