Today was the first day back to school after winter break. I plan on actually using CSS this semester, so that my website isn't just a bunch of lines of black, 14 pt. Times New Roman. During today's FRC meeting, we separated into 5 groups that went a bit deeper into the ideas that people had come up with in the last meeting. My group was in charge of the gear scoring mechanisms, and we decided that a forklift-style mechanism would work the best. During school, I had an idea for the rope/winch to climb up the airship where the rope would be covered in the loop side of velcro, and the shaft of the sinch would be covered in the hook side of velcro to adhere onto the rope, but since I wasn't on the team that was discussing ideas for the rope mechanisms, I wasn't able to share my idea to the team.
2017 FRC Game ManualToday, Mr. Miller walked the class through getting our website files moved onto Google Drive, and using Google Sites to set up this semester's web page for those who were having trouble using html. The advantage of using Google Sheets is that you didn't need to know how to code, and it would be easier to edit. However, the downside is that you won't learn how to use html. At today's FRC meeting, the groups came together to combine our ideas, and then we discussed what mechanisms we should be focusing on. During this time, I was able to talk to the team about my idea that I had come up with yesterday for putting velcro on the rope and the shaft of the winch. After narrowing down the combinations of robot concepts into 4 choices, we separated once again, this time into 4 groups, and ranked the remaining 4 concepts. By the end of the meeting, the third choice, a combination of a gear mechanism and a low goal shooter, proved to have the greatest estimated scoring potential.
Today, we had a Wednesday Challenge where we had to cut out a 1 foot by 1 foot square out of cardboard. Since there was not a FRC meeting today, I was able to get home and mess around with my website. I learned how to put in graphics into the background of my website, and some cool buttons that give alerts and change color and stuff.
Wednesday Challenge 1: 1 Foot SquareToday, we got in our groups from yesterday's Wednesday Challenge and then took a team picture with the cardboard square that we had cut out. Afterwards, we worked on our websites for a little while. During today's FRC meetime, we split off again to work on components of the proposed robot design of gears and a low shooter. I joined the group working on the mechanism design of the robot, where we further split up into groups of 3 or 4 and worked on eitheer the gear or low goal mechanism. My group worked on the low goal mechanism, and the design that we came up with was a simple box with a sloped bottom that fed out to a door. Our design was estimated to have a capacity of 18 balls per trip. We cadded the design out onto tinkercad, and plan to 3d print out a miniature scale model of our mechanism.
Today, we had a substitute during first period, and just had self study for a review test on Tuesday, I worked on my website. During this period, I learned how to use CSS to automatically set all images' heights to 300 pixels, and the width to the correct value to keep the image from distorting. This is a great help because I no longer have to waste time trying to get all of my images to have any sort of consistency. During 5th period, we also had a substitute, so I worked some more on my website. I learned how to use pagination to turn my website from a long column of text into multiple linked pages with a week's work of content each. After school, today , we had FRC's first Friday meeting of the year, which went form right after school ended until 9:00pm. After taking the written portion of the basic shop safety test, we ate dinner, which was chili and soup. For dessert, we had doughnuts and a bunch of cookies.
