Like everyone else Wave has been anxiously waiting for kickoff. Saturday came and the overall feeling after the video was excitement. After 2 years of elevators and pick & place games we get to shoot things!

Most teams spend kickoff weekend reading the rules over and over and coming up with an ordered list of objectives/criteria that their robot is going to accomplish this year. Wave does it a little differently.

On Wave we spend the 1st part of the morning after the video release in small groups all reading the rules out loud. Then each group reads the rules again. The 2nd time through the groups answers question on a worksheet.

The worksheet Wave uses is modified from Brian Maher’s kickoff worksheet he created during his time on 2791. His worksheet is very comprehensive and a great tool for anyone looking at how they should organize their kickoff.  After the groups have finished the worksheet we reconvene as a large group and answer any questions the groups might have come up with and we go over the worksheet one more time to make sure everyone is on the same page and we all see things the same.

Once we have a consensus we jump right into prototyping. This year our list of what we are prototyping is as follows

Hooded shooter
Dual wheel shooter (side by side or vertical top/bottom)
In-taking power cells from the floor into the robot
Climbing
Serializing / Hopper

With our list of what we are going to prototype we split into groups and got to work. A side by side dual wheel shooter quickly came together and we started getting good consistency from 36 ft from the goal.  You can see video below

Stats on the dual wheels shooter
6” colson wheels

2” of compression, which means there is 5 inches between the wheels

Each wheel is direct driven by a 775 pro through a 3:1 versa-planetary gearbox.

End of the Sunday we got a hooded shooter prototype together. It was getting some good distance but we did not get any measurements or video of this prototype. Monday’s goal is to get our 2012 robot up and running and modified to shoot the power cells. Stay tuned for that!

Climber and intake prototypes took a backseat after the shooters started to actually shoot power cells. Goals for both of them is to get something working this week.