Lions, Tigers, and… Robots? Oh my! The week starting January 29th, the 4th week of build season, the Girls of Steel had a very action-packed adventure!
Monday, girls came in early to get a head start on the excitement. We worked on our lift mechanism, and trained girls in the art of riveting! Just like our inspiration, Rosie, we worked on improving our chassis and riveted our wheel treads!
Tuesday, right after school, we helped the Brashear Bulls robotics team, FRC 7274, the rookie team we’re mentoring, and hurried back to our meeting at CMU! At the all-hands meeting, we finalized our robot names and introduced the applications for the competition season leadership council! The competition robot’s name is Clyde and the practice robot’s name is Blinky. After all-hands we went to the high bay – our mentors encouraged us to work hard, and we made tremendous progress on our robot!
Thursday, we started with a small meeting with a handful of girls and a few mentors. Once girls started trickling in, we got to work! We made advancements on our lift mechanism, and we were able to test code on our practice robot! The collector mechanism is coming together, and our robot drive code is up-and-running. FTC members shadow us on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Saturdays.
Friday, we had a dine-and- donate fundraiser event at a new local Indian BBQ restaurant, Choolaah! Thirty percent of proceeds (about $1500) from the event went directly to the team, and we’re super grateful to have had the opportunity to work with them! (We’re also glad we got to try some really yummy Indian food!)
Saturday, our build season leadership council met! Then, we got back to build. Vision code is improving, and we made a few important discoveries! Luckily, we’ll be able to continue improvement of vision code through the rest of build season. We got our collector mechanism attached to the lift mechanism, and we got it to work together! At around one o’clock, we held drive team tryouts at the practice field, including communication testing games, driving drills, and role exploration!
We’re looking forward to building next week as everything comes together!