January 18, 2020
Since there was still work to do for the week, the team came in on Saturday. Mr. Millar, Ms. White, and Mr. Harvey were all busy, but luckily security allowed a parent supervisor for today. Sam somehow convinced his dad to take up this responsibility. Mr. Gluskoter spent the day sitting at Mr. Millar’s desk just straight vibin’. For 4 straight hours, he watched Youtube videos on how to buy a used Ferrari. Looks like Sam will have quite the ride once he goes to college.
Miguel called assembly to come in to finish building the octocanum drive base from last semester so that drivers could start practicing with the new controls we developed. However, the battery mount still needed parts to be cut on the CNC and 3D printed. Additionally, bumper materials had not arrived yet, so assembly was once again left to organise more parts and clean out the FRC cupboards.
Arav, Raj, and Rahul sorting parts
An hour into working, Rhea decided to take a short walk to the Middle School library. After sitting there for a few minutes, she realised that she had accidentally wandered onto the filming set of famous Singaporean Youtuber, JianHao Tan. She then proceeded to fangirl on Slack, all on the wrong channel, once again using up a significant portion of our 10k message limit, like last year. Rahul, Raj, and Arav suddenly also became huge fans of JianHao Tan and decided to try their luck at a fan meet and greet with him. After amassing paparazzi consisting of robotics kids, JianHao Tan’s crew promptly kicked them out of the Middle School library.
As the day went on, more people started to trickle in. Sam, Caden, Marcus, and Joanne worked on the folding table for the Control Panel. Ryan and Shion came back from a VEX IQ regional, where one of our SAS teams made it to the world championship. Shion finished placing reflective tape on the loading bay. Thankfully, all that was needed was a small box under the middle opening, so Shion didn’t need to spend two hours again (not that he needed to last time, anyways).
Marcus working on the Control Panel table
Outreach also had some work to do. Megan came in to start planning out a robotics promo. Angel came in to design cover pages for all documentation. Junior and Aman started planning outreach events that could potentially take place this season, and Rhea worked with NPSI on their upcoming outreach event.
Surprisingly, with their looming Sunday night deadline, only three members from CAD came in. Even more surprisingly, none of them were Ming (*Gasp!*). While Ming peacefully worked on CAD from home, Gaurav, Theo, and Emilio finished up their CAD tasks. As they waited for Ming’s approval on their work, they boasted to other busy members that they were “jobless.” Upon hearing this, Miguel began to list out non-CAD tasks that could be completed. Suddenly, numerous problems appeared in their CAD that had to be urgently attended to. Coincidence? Yeah, definitely.
Emilio, Theo, and Gaurav furiously CAD-ing
Electronics came in to work on the octocanum drive and the prototype flywheel shooter. Keya started on the pneumatics with help from Marcus while Gaurav did inventory of the pneumatic parts. Later, Ming dubbed Gaurav the Inventory Lead because he did such a good job at it. Gaurav bragged about his new title, not knowing he had been condemned to inventorying more parts in the future. Miguel checked in on electronics, which Tanisha claimed was all completed. He looked down at the e-board and could not find a single wire. Tanisha also noticed this and quickly added on that only the wiring needed to be done. But other than the wiring, electronics was definitely completely finished.
A few nights before, Sam was very adamant about everyone eating lunch before coming in and eating dinner after leaving on Saturday. He also made sure everyone had a 30 minute break at 2:45, expecting everyone to not order any food. Junior, wishing to redeem himself from his blasphemous pizza ordering fiasco of last year, passionately disagreed. In the end, it was Sam that broke his own rule, but he made sure to order the food himself so Junior couldn’t suggest eating cardboard again to save on money.
After the break was over, most members returned to their work. However, there were three that were unaccounted for: Rahul, Raj, and Arav. Nearly 20 minutes after the break had ended, they burst through the door, somehow sweaty. When asked about this, Raj quickly responded that they had went to the Apex to work out. Not believing this, Ush and Mihika said they saw them walking around the school in circles as they went to pick up their bubble tea. Arav admitted they got lost. For all we know, they could have visited Sohit at his small community college on the West Coast.
After finding out we had the gym booked again, the team started preparing to test the prototype flywheel shooter with the new Power Cell. After carrying everything upstairs, they found both doors to the gym locked. Sam and his dad made the long journey to security for the key. While waiting, Miguel, Joanne, Caden, and Shion found two office chairs outside the Apex (for some odd reason). They took Lightning McQueen’s wise words, “I am speed,” to heart and raced the chairs around the area.
Eventually, Sam and his dad returned with the key to the gym. Everything was set up, but there were problems controlling the speeds of top and bottom flywheels. After troubleshooting for 30 minutes, Ush and Tanisha realised that Hari and Vayun had coded over each others code. With both coders not present or picking up any calls, testing would have to wait for another day.
While things this week might have seemed a bit slow, robot production will finally start this upcoming Monday.