Our second week of build season was very eventful and lot of progress was made. The programming girls got a lot of work done; they managed to finish coding all the subsystems. They also started autonomous and coding for the automated capabilities of the buttons to make it easier for the drive team to control the robot. That’s was Girls of Steel is all about! Working as a team and trying to help out the other subteams, and making this process as simple as possible for others. The girls from electronics finished the electronics boards just for testing the chassis. They also finished the CAD for the final boards and started mounting components. The design team worked on getting the CAD drawn out and making small edits to it. They are also thoroughly checking if things will fit. The girls on mechanical finished assembling the chassis and fabrication. They also finished setting up the task board and got it running. A lot of the girls worked hard to make parts for the robot. They also started assembling the three manipulators.
Things are moving very quickly and the girls are all working hard to make the robot perfect. Here’s the link to the Week 2 FiveAwesomeRobots video by Girls of Steel: https://youtu.be/tH5aORluCHA .
As for the FTC team, they are making sure their robot is perfect for their upcoming competition. They made a backup robot which is 95% complete. They also put together a “Girls of Steel Faulty Robot Checklist” which includes all the solutions to any electronics or mechanical malfunctions. Smart idea! They started autonomous mode programming for getting the climbers into the bucket. The girls worked on the awards they can qualify for and listed the tasks they need to complete in order to qualify for remaining awards. They took guidance from Chuck and decided to have a pivot for the arm and cover the wheels with threads. They had drive practices throughout the week to test their robot.
Both the FTC girls and the Girls of Steel worked extremely hard and were very productive, while also having so much fun doing STEM!