This was a very exciting week for Girls of Steel! Starting with one of the biggest days of the season, kickoff! Kickoff was on January 4th and most of the Girls of Steel watched from Carnegie Mellon University, but some of us went to the local kickoff event to pick up the of parts and met members of the 501st Legion Starkiller Garrison.

Everyone arrived ready to see the Infinite Recharge challenge, which looks to be every exciting! As soon as we watched the challenge video and had a chance to read over the game manual, it was off to planning. Girls of Steel started with taking time to understand the different elements of the game, how the points worked, and what we needed to do to accomplish our season goals.

After a couple hours of discussion, we came to the conclusion that we want to prioritize the hanging capability, but still shoot the power cells and spin the control panel. By trying to accomplish so much this year, we had to immediately get started with building and designing. That lead into Sunday, January 5th, where the team focused on coming up with a plan on what the robot will look like. This technical meeting was four hours long and, just like every year, was extremely productive. After this meeting the team had a good idea on what we were in store for and the technical subteam leads were able to start planning out what they needed to accomplish. 

During build season we hold meetings 4 times a week (M, Tu, Th, & Sa) and after this packed weekend of planning and design, the team started to get to work on building the robot on Monday, the 6th. For this week, the technical goal was to get the basic chassis done. This way the team has a good base for the rest of the building. The mechanical team already knew the design for this chassis since we create the same base every year, so they just had to get to work on that. This meant cutting metal plates, testing wheel spacing, and making sure that the build was stable overall. While mechanical focused on that, the electrical team needed to assemble a working E-Board that could be used for driving this base chassis. While this E-Board is not meant to have anything such as pneumatics on it yet, that isn’t to say that more complicated additions won’t be made later in the season. In other words, this E-Board is simply a prototype for the final robot. During this whole week, design needed to stay one step ahead of everyone else. This means that they spent their week focusing on creating designs of the attachments that the mechanical team will prototype during week 2. Design and mechanical will stay working very close together during the rest of the build season, almost like one subteam, to make sure that all of the attachments come out as perfectly as possible.

While these three subteams continued to work on the robot, the programming team worked on preparing code for the weeks to come. The programming team, just like every year, needed to create the new project for 2020 season and finish assembling basic drive code for the finished chassis. The programming subteam also needed to start looking at the color sensor code for the control panel and begin thinking about what programs will need to be written based on what Girls of Steel wants to accomplish this year.

This week we were excited to receive special gifts from Susan, of team 1038, Lakota Robotics.  We’ll be sure to wear our new swag at the competitions.

Also, this week our mentors and parents began work on our new robotics practice field at Carnegie Mellon. We are already planning drive team tryouts there next week!

Girls of Steel had a very busy week 1, and accomplished a lot! The whole team will keep working and moving towards their goals for the season. Here is to another amazing week of build season 2020!