Squared Away 2019-2020

 

Today we found out that we will not be travelling to the U.S. Open Robotics Championship and Vex Worlds because of the Covid-19 pandemic. We have made incredible upgrades to all of the robots but we will not be able to test them in competition. We are happy and amazed with all that we have accomplished this year and hope we can meet and do robotics next year.

 

 

With the Hawaii season behind us, we are now preparing for our next competitions! Teams A and W are headed to Council Bluffs, Iowa for the U.S. Open Robotics Championship while Teams X and Y are headed to Vex Worlds in Louisville, Kentucky. There's a lot to to do as we try to upgrade our robots for our final competitions of the season!

 

 

 

Today we mostly did programming on Virtual World. The first world in programming was called Palm Island. I think it was called Palm Island because it has a lot of palm trees and is an island. In Palm Island I got to mission 4 where I pushed lobster traps in the water. I got to do Ruins of Atlantis also because I did Palm Island already. Ruins of Atlantis’s goal was to collect coins and diamonds. It was more challenging to do Atlantis.
Sloane

 

Today we sorted pieces and made worked our drives. Me and Sloane made a better drive than our last one. It was better than the last one because it was more stable when we used the large chassis corner connectors.
Paige
Today I learned about the driver controls, the Arcade and Tank drive. Apparently you can have different controls on the same drive. I like Tank drive better because I had more practice with it.
​We were all adding lifts to our drives. I was supposed to make a double reverse 4 bar. Raihau had to make a 6 bar. I had some troubles, though. I had to make three different ones and the last one was the one that worked.
Seizo

 

 

 

Today we built the third Squared Away field. I did the green cube. It was a little bit hard, but after 5 minutes, I got the hang of it. We learned about how to set up the field and also learned about what we need for our robot like a traction link so the ball won’t fall out of the claw.
We also watched the starter video. After that we practiced driving the gear and chain robot. It was fun. I managed to get some balls in the cubes, but since there was no claws, we couldn’t do too many. But I know that it was a practice robot.
We worked on our own robot designs for Squared Away and made a description of what it's supposed to do. I did something that scoops up the balls and keeps it in the pyramid position. Also it had claws that pick up the cubes and put them in the corner or on the platform. Then I drew it, it was actually hard to draw it.
While we were planning our designs we learned how we should document it in our engineering log. For the engineering log, we all learned that we need to cross out mistakes with a line instead of scribbles and how to use all of the space on the page.
​Sloane, Raihau and Seizo