FTC 7314 Engineering Notebook 2014-09-06

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Competition Season Meeting

Meeting Date Meeting Time Location Attendees
Saturday,September 6, 2014 10:30am-5pm TCHS Brandywine Trevor, Brad, CJ, Morgan, Nick, Amal, Eric, Josh, Justin, Braden, Laura


Tasks Reflections
Attend the Game Reveal
  • The team saw that the game this year has a lot of chances to score. We also saw that it will be a challenge to complete the tasks this year.
  • Josh thought the game was very interesting and had a lot of interesting scoring objectives. The game also used several elements that he really did not understand.
  • The robot has to throw or drop balls into tubes to score points. It also has to push the tubes into marked zones. Some of the team have never done this before and think it's cool.
  • We got awesome new shirts and learned about the game, which Brad thinks looks very interesting and he thinks it looks like it will be very fun.
  • The team also saw people from Pittsburgh having a discussion of the schedule in the TCHS Cafeteria.
  • There was a video shown of the game that showed the instructions of the game and how to score points, lose points, and keep the same amount of points.
  • We tried to determine what was under the tarp before the game reveal... they didn't get far.
  • The game is really interesting with many different possible strategies.
Eat Pizza
  • We ate cookies and everybody enjoyed the cookies. Some of us ate pizza while others brought a lunch. Water was also provided with the lunch.
  • There were 12 boxes of Pizza and half were pepperoni and half were cheese.
  • Yum!
Meet other Teams
  • The team got to talk to a bunch of different people from different teams. Some of us talked with the girls from the Firebird team about different ideas.
  • We got to go to the field and play with the balls, thinking of a strategy on how make the ball go into the center goal to get a max. of 60 points. The field sure was crowded!
  • We got to meet the other teams and see how hard or easy our competition is. We also got to become friendly with other teams
  • We got to meet and hang out with the other competing teams in the competition. Josh knew some of the people from the other team.
  • There were about 10 teams in the cafeteria at once.
  • There were teams that were in their senior year of high school. We must step up our game to do better than them.
  • We showed some other teams the FRC warehouse we work out of.
  • We all played on the field.
Learn the Rules
  • We spent an hour reading the rules and started to get sleepy. We all listened and learned all the rules.
  • We watched a video about the rules and one of the refs explained them.
  • Sadly, some rules ruled out our ideas.
  • It is important to know the rules, so we don't violate them. It would stink if we couldn't compete because we didn't read the rules!
Brainstorm / Prioritize / Strategize:D
  • We strategized for 2 hours and came up with multiple different strategies. We learned that game strategy is key this year in order to succeed.
  • We thought of strategies for the autonomous period, tele-op and the a little bit of end game.
  • We also made several experiments on how many balls would fit in a rolling tube. We found it is only really worth it to shoot the small balls if we shoot at least 3 in between the big balls. Otherwise, it does not contribute enough to the overall volume to make a difference.
  • We started autonomous strategizing and that's when Eric helped out and wrote done what the team was strategizing. The team decided to score the center goal balls in autonomous, because it is worth 60 points in autonomous, plus additional points in the endgame. Overall, the center goal is definitally worth the effort! In the rest of autonomous, we will focus on getting the rolling goals and the robot parked or lifted on to the ramp.
  • We started our brain storming in the FRC room which was very hot. When the meeting in our normal (air conditioned) room ended we rushed in and continued our brainstorming.
  • We thought shooting the balls through the air would be really unreliable, so we are leaning towards making a mechanism that can reliably dump balls into the tubes.

Action and idea Journal



Recorded by: Amal Date: Journal Editor: Date: