Overall Progress

For the past few weeks my blog has been focused on our robot and preparing for competition. Tonight I'm going to broaden my scope and visit all the different areas of our team. Every FIRST team is run like a business and a business needs more than just people designing and making stuff.

Our team has a marketing group, and it is their responsibility to be the public relations for our team. They talk to businesses for sponsorship, as well as other teams during the competition. Our marketing team is working on our Chairman's Award presentation (which is the highest and most prestigious award in FIRST). They are also making a video that will be used to tell FIRST, and the world, what our team has done to promote FIRST in our community.

We also have a web development team, and they are tasked with giving our team an online presence. The web team is still hard at work taking pictures and writing content for our site. You can see our site (and their work) at: http://www.creston904.com.

The build team is making their final changes to our 2009 competition robot. We've had some issues with the moon rocks getting lodged together in the hopper, but I'm confident that they will have those issues worked out in the next week.

I've been keeping you updated on the programming and electrical team, and we are starting to work much closer with the build team to make sure all functionality gets tested and tweaked. Tonight we finished working through issues related with our operator controls, a mechanism to engage and disengage our traction control system and our hook assembly to hold an "empty cell". The empty cell is a game piece that can be turned into a high-scoring game piece if used correctly.

A lot of teams will also have a CAD team, that designs all the parts for the robot. From the start our team didn't have the support to use CAD to design all the parts this year. Also, there are teams that creates a 3D animation on a given topic and this was another area where our team was weak and it looks like this may not get finished before the deadline.

All in all our team is making good progress and I'm happy with what we've accomplished. We have another week to tie up all the loose ends. No problem! :)