Select a subgroup to view their Weekly Report.

This week could very well be described as prolific. The team lingered later than usual and we had more collaboration with the electrical team. Several objectives were given to sub-groups within the mechanical team in order to use our time efficiently and to increase productivity. Time dwindled to our last few grains of sand (as in an hourglass).

Saturday, we came in the shop to initially work on the new side plates for the wheel modules and to enhance the kicker. With the new side plates that cave inward, the robot could straddle and ride on the bumps. So far, we know of no other team capable of both straddling and riding the bump. This is advantageous because the driver can hang the robot much easier and faster by driving it along the bump to align itself with the tower. Also, improvements were made to the kicking mechanism to help its stability. A piece of Bosch aluminum was wedged between the parallel longer pieces, gussets were placed at the corners, and a damper was added to where it would impact.

We came in Monday morning to find captivating changes on the robot. These included the installment of the new side plates and drive chains, the detachment of the circuit board off the robot, and the assembly of the new kicker mechanism. The kicker mechanism is composed of a double frame, a DeWalt transmission, and a muletape pulley system. We deeply appreciate the hard work the mentors put in on the robot on Chinese New Year/Valentine's Day Sunday.

However, we knew that we still had much more to do. The electrical team thought about the layout of the electrical components on the robot while we worked on refining the beater bar and the kicker. We made plates to attach the beater bar onto the chassis and a tie bar for support. For the kicking mechanism, we tested out different variables that contributed to force and accuracy. In the end we felt that a set of double springs held the potential energy we needed to score. The mentors decided to shorten the rear bar in an attempt to herd balls while driving. They also assisted the electrical team on the wiring of the electrical components.

In the meantime, we anwered questions about Mr. Ing for the Woodie Flowers award, which the PR team is going to send in for the Championship event. Midweek, we received the embroidered fabric for the bumper, which looked impressively nice, and with which we covered the bumpers we made last week.

On Friday, we were honored to be visited by the new Hawaii Regional Director, General Ishikawa, who was impressed with our progress and robot design. Though it was sort of late, the mentors finally moved on to making the hanging mechanism for the robot. The mentors had the idea of hanging the robot by using two flexible fiberglass flag poles to whip a hook up onto the bar of the platform. It was unfortunately a miserable failure as the hook had too much of an impact and it recoiled back to the ground. Our depression continued as we discovered the robot has the potential to be overweight. Time was running low and in front of us was a long list of things still needing to be done.

Although we continued working strenuously on the hanging mechanism on the last day of this week, we solemnly considered the option of giving it up. Our nerves are cracking as time pushes us closer and closer to the shipment date and lack of sleep finally haunting us. We must cram for our robot before we have to say bye-bye to it on Tuesday, so we'll give it all our best and make miracles happen!

This week was our last full week of the 2009-10 FRC season. The beginning of this week focused more on the concepts of our strategy and scoring while the end of this week was all about action. During the beginning of Week Six, we continued to work on different aspects of the robot such as the kicker and camera. On Saturday, Sam and Bryant asked the newer members to block the target set up above the goal in different ways to see how the occlusion of the camera tracking would be affected. They wanted to see if the camera could still recognize the target even if the plane of the circle was broken. The camera did recognize the target as a circle, but was confused and ended up tracking multiple targets. The entire team took a one day "siesta" on Sunday (Valentine's Day and Chinese New Year) in order to rest up for the remainder of Week Six.

On Monday, the main task the electrical team worked on was finishing up the dimensions and the layout of the control board. This year, we reduced the size of the board to 34" long by 12" wide by 3" high, but the layout is similar to last year's. Some changes include putting the Driver Station on top of the cover and using velcro to keep it in place. We have three on/off switches for autonomous which allows us to have eight different autonomous programs. We also have an SPST switch (auto/manual kicking) for the kicker and another for the driver (manual override). As the board layout was worked on, Fu Quan and Ms. Kim worked on the documentation of our teleoperated code. By Tuesday, the dimensions and layout of the control board was done and taken to Min's Plastics for fabrication.

On Tuesday, several autonomous strategies were created for different zones. One of the strategies created that day included "messing up" the opponent's autonomous program, as well as having the robot dance. At the end of the day, though, we decided that for Zone 1 we would score then move towards the center. In Zone 2, we would attempt to score or pass to the bot in Zone 1. In Zone 3, we planned to pass the balls to Zone 1 and go over the bump. Sam also explained more about the arcade mode for teleoperated control to the newer members so that they could start on the autonomous code (this included the different modes like car-right and car- left).

Wednesday was when the electrical team started planning the wiring layout of the robot. Mr. Ing called the electrical team over to discuss the placement of the electronics on the robot. The mechanical team had already mounted the power distribution board and were now consulting the electrical team about the placement of the six Jaguars, three Victors, and the digital sidecar. It was decided that there would be three jaguars on each side for the drive and that the power distribution board would be on the right side of the bot. Meanwhile, the cRIO and digital sidecar would be on the left side of the bot.

The electrical team began wiring the electrical components of the robot on Thursday. We spent hour after hour crimping, labeling, and tie-strapping everything in place. It was predicted that the wiring would take long since almost all the wires have to be run around the frame of the robot. We started by wiring everything on the left side of the robot because it would be easier for us to see how much space the components needed and where to run the longer wires. The wires were run through twice; it was hard to trace wires the first time with no labels. So, we took it apart and re-ran the wires after we labeled and tied everything.

A special occasion did happen during the wiring process though. On Friday, General Ishikawa visited our team to check on our progress. Sadly, our robot was lifeless when he visited us since we didn't finish wiring for the electrical components. Instead of showing him the robot moving before his eyes, we showed him some videos that we took throughout the season to just give him the general idea how our robot works. After this visit, we continued to wire the left side. Once the left side was finished, we wired the right side of the robot.

It took us all of Thursday and half of Friday night to wire everything to the PDB. We started wiring the PWMs after.

This was the animation team’s final week together! All of us experienced some symptoms of insomnia, hypertension, and the feeling of “all or nothing”.

On February 16th, our team gathered in the shop for our “final” day together. By then, we had the audio of the script and the clips synchronized in Premiere Pro. The only things that were missing were the last five seconds and the background music. As Yueshi’s laptop rendered the last scene, we took turns taking naps and typing the required information that was needed when submitting our entry. The rendering process for the last five second clip took 11 hours to get to 90% and then blacked out on Yue Shi’s computer during the ride home. What a tragedy!

An even worse problem struck when Yue Shi arrived at Michelle’s house the same night. We planned on using Bryant’s laptop to fix up the “animation” process and then render with his laptop afterwards. However, when Yue Shi turned on Bryant’s laptop, the Dell Media Center came up instead of windows startup. We stared at the screen helplessly, and then looked at each other with Bryant-is-going-to-kill-us looks. Finally having the courage to call Bryant, he told us that the hard disk got somewhat corrupted and that the recovery CD was needed to fix it which meant we needed to wait until he came home from robotics in order to fix it. Meanwhile, Yue Shi’s parents wanted her home since it was already 11:00 pm. There was no way that the animation could be finished separately, so Michelle went over to Yue Shi's house instead where Bryant also, miraculously, fixed his laptop.

Yue Shi used Bryant’s laptop to fix the camera speed for the last scene and Michelle corrected some unneeded key-points afterwards. Before exporting, Yue Shi transferred the file onto her computer to split the rendering process. With undone homework, Yueshi almost pulled an all-nighter and Michelle finally gave in as well, taking a nap at 4:30 am. When morning struck a little more than two hours later, Yue Shi realized that she forgot to delete one of the star-fish that was apparently floating in the last 50 frames. The rendering process for Bryant’s laptop was at about 135 frames out of 150, which left with about an hour and a half to complete. Since Yueshi’s laptop was done rendering the first simpler half throughout the night, we used it to re-render the frames that caught the floating starfish in camera.

During first recess, Michelle rushed back to the shop to render the same frames that Yue Shi’s laptop was rendering because it might not be done in time. By lunchtime, it was finally done rendering. However, when the clips of the last scene (5 seconds) were put together, there was a slight jump in our animation. It was caused by 10 missing frames which we thought the floating starfish was not present. We rendered the 10 missing frames and then compiled it right after school. We started uploading at 2:30pm and failed once. Yue Shi told everyone to change to the wireless network in the shop as we attempted our second upload. Once again, the uploading process went up to 100% and was followed by a page saying, “This page cannot be found." We all sat there praying for our last attempt to upload (this was around 2:50pm with a 3:00pm deadline), but it failed. “This can’t be… we just missed the deadline because ‘This page cannot be found’!!! No way…” So we checked ChiefDelphi to see if others were experiencing the same problem. Indeed others teams had trouble uploading, too! Even those who started their uploads three to five hours before the deadline (and a few since the day before) had experienced the same thing. Yue Shi sent an email to FIRST about the problem, and Michelle sent another email later to the FIRSTBase Autodesk Community Support Center and FIRST. There was nothing we could do but to wait for replies.

The next day, Michelle got a reply from FIRSTBase Autodesk Community at around 10:00am. We followed the instructions in the email which told us to upload to an alternative site. The deadline was 5:00pm CST on February 18, 2010, which is 1:00pm for us. During the uploading process, Michelle text messaged Yue Shi to let her know how everything was going. At 2:53 pm, Yue Shi received a text message from Michelle saying, “I just received a congratulation email. It is submitted into competition. And also some confirmation replies from my mails sent through the support center.”

The three animators gathered at the shop after school. Surprisingly, we didn’t dance around and make noises like the way we planned to. But, there were a lot of happy sighs and awkward smiling because our facial tissue was damaged due to lack of sleep.

Submissions galore! This was deadline week (emphasis on the word "dead") for both our team and the Animation team, and we watched in horror as the Animation team frantically clicked on the submission form over and over again, unable to upload their painfully-constructed video. Six weeks of sleepless work, all for nothing? They contacted FIRST with the utmost urgency, hoping they would still be able to somehow submit their video.

Their drama occurred the day before our own submissions were due, almost like a warning. Of course, we had already submitted our Woodie Flowers Finalist Award entry the week before with no complications, but we had yet to submit the more important essay: the Chairman's Award entry.

So there we were, scanning through over 20,000 images from the previous years, looking for the best pictures to represent our Chairman's message. After selecting the photos and photoshopping captions onto them, we attached them to the submission form and sent the entry in at 1:20pm HST on the due date. Sure, it was during our usual school instruction time, but we did not want to face last-minute issues like the Animation team did as we learned from their ordeal. It was better to sacrifice a mere 15 minutes of class time than have to spend hours, possibly days later on trying to get judges to accept a late entry.

Unfortunately, we STILL discovered a problem with our entry later on. They did not include the last 22 characters of our essay! We had sent an email to the FIRST organization, explaining what happened. 22 characters may not seem like much, but that was our concluding sentence! Let's hope this works out in the end.

There was also a resubmission to write for Mr. Alan Ing's Woodie Flowers nomination. We rewrote the essay, added brand new quotes, and submitted that one via email, straight to the Championship judges. If anything goes wrong with that submission, we will most likely cry and/or kick something. But don't worry, we'll make sure not to kick anything (or anyone) important.

The essays are not the center of the universe, though. We have other things to do! As soon as we went home early for a "break," we were contacted by the Website team and told to write a VEX team description and to look for more pictures for the "Other FIRST Programs" on our website. Our work never ends.

Next week, we have a school assembly that we will be attending as the McKinley Robotics Team. There, we will demonstrate our robots to enlighten our fellow classmates. So we looked over and divided up the script for the assembly among the PR team. Oh yes, it has been decided that we shall all speak at the assembly ourselves instead of delegating the task to other people.

As for the handouts for the Hawaii Regional, we are now debating whether we should save the trouble and let people decorate them themselves or just continue with our stamping. The tag design for the Portland Regional leis have been completed and all that's left is to print them out and attach them to the leis!

One of the school faculty members, Mr. Higa, helped us out by making address signage for the crate. They are like stickers, so they are changeable after each regional. How awesome is that? Mr. Higa was also kind enough to embroider our bumper material which the mechanical team later put together.

But our FIRST team wasn't the only busy ones. Our VEX team was also working on their robot like mad because the VEX Tournament at Kahala was on Saturday! We helped with the preparations (as our team was in charge of setup) by labeling the game pieces, counting them, and bagging them.

This week, we also had the honor of showing General Ishikawa of the Hawaii Army National Guard and Ms. Corrie Heck of the Robotics Organizing Committee around. Everyone was on their best behavior, answered politely, and showed them around the shop. Good job everyone!

That concludes our sixth week. The next few days will be super busy for everyone. GOOD LUCK, EVERYONE PARTICIPATING IN FIRST! SEE YOU AT THE COMPETITION!

The build season is almost over! This week we have taken pictures and videos of the various events that have happened with our team. We finished the Week Five gallery and fixed some of the captioning errors. We also filmed practice runs of the robot, the kicking mechanism and the controlling of the soccer ball.

We made new header banners for all of the past competitions and made more buttons for our site. We will post videos of our team and robot sometime in the near future.