Week 1: build season begins

To begin this week Bedford Express analyzed the new Rebuilt game. After breaking for lunch we broke down the game based on the game rules, robot rules, ranking points, penalties, and scoring. We use these break out sessions to make sure our students understand the game thoroughly and are on the same page with the rules. We utilize the games manual to get these answers. After the dinner break our team gathered for our MoSCoW meeting to break down what we want our robot to do. MoSCoW is a phrase we use which means what our robot must have, should have, could have, and won't have. After we analyze the game and the rules we gather the whole team to be a part of these decisions. In the must column we make our decisions based on what we want our robot to do at the first competition. Then we move on to the should and could. In the should column we put the next level of what we think our robot should do.

While the students are in these meetings the teams dedicated parents and mentors take the time out of their days to help our team build the field. We are extremely grateful for their support and want to give a huge thank you for everything they do for Bedford Express. By the end of Kickoff day they had 75% of one half of the field built!

Here is our mentors and parents building the holder for the net on the hub.

This week has been heavily based on prototyping our subsystems. Prototyping is where we take an idea we have and make it out of wood or anything we can find to test proof of concept. Our team has split into a few different groups such as, intake, indexer, shooter, and climber. These subsystem ideas are student led with some mentor help. We chose a student leader that has experience with prototyping and the rest of the students get to decide where to help.

Impact interviews were held and the 3rd presenter has been chosen. Thank you to everyone who tried out. Congratulations to Addi H., Addi will be joining veteran presenters Grace F. and Aaron M.

Something new our team is doing this season is using old robots that have the subsystems taken off to test our prototypes. This will give us a better understanding where our subsystems need to go and what needs to be changed. The first subsystem we are testing on an old robot is a turret. Our programmers are currently working on integrating the limelight tracking with positioning of the turret. Our team will continue to work on this next week as well.

We have taken our 2020 turret and put it on an old chassis to test positions.

We would like to thank all of our sponsors for making this possible. We truly wouldn’t be able to do it without you.