What I Want To Do and How I Want to Do It

I was originally going to follow up my introduction with more information about Lynchburg so I could get feedback from others with similar resources. However based on the early feedback I have received so far I am going to start with a post about what my goals are and how I plan to achieve them. That I think will let feedback focus on whatever my weaknesses may be rather than just general rookie tips (which are also valuable). It is probably worth noting that almost none of the Ideas I have about how a rookie team should be put together are uniquely mine. I have unapologetically stolen ideas from just about everyone I have met, talked to, or read posts by in FIRST, I don’t have time (or probably the ability) to give credit to everyone but if you see something that you think I stole from someone else you are probably right. Karthik, JVN, Andy Grady, the team 78/121 guys, and Miki Oliver all have quite a bit of influence on my ideas, and I am sure if you ask them where they got them from they will point you to the mentors before them.

 

Goals:

Ideally of course I would love to see this team turn into the next 2056, as a team on the field the goal will always be win every match. Obviously I won’t be too disappointed if we don’t win multiple regionals and make the conversation of best bots in the country (getting to that level is a long term goal but not a requirement for our rookie year). Realistically I would like to be competitive on the field; depending on the depth of the regional we compete at I would say making the top 8 would be a necessary qualifier for being a successful on field team.

 

Off the field success would be based on one thing, if you did not see the team shirt or number in the pits you would not know we were rookies. I firmly believe the team should be capable of bringing home an award at every event it attends (Winning an award at each event is very attainable for rookies). I would not be satisfied with a season that doesn’t include qualifying for Championships.

 

How to Do It:

 

The Strategy:

Find the low hanging fruit. Dump bots in 2006, ramp bots in 2007, and playing the front zone in 2010. If you can score a lot of points with a simple design go with it. Someday I would love to be an elite team that just excels at every aspect of the game. When you have a team full of mentors with years of experience, veteran students with design experience, and a good understanding of your capabilities this is an awesome goal. Realistically rookies don’t have that; the plan would be to identify the simplest strategy that will yield the most points. I would rather get to the second half of the build season with plenty of time to drive, program, test and iterate than get to the weekend before ship and be finishing off a 10 step Rube-Goldberg machine that completes all of the tasks the game has to offer.

 

The Robot:

Similar to the strategy the idea here is to build the simplest machine that completes the desired strategy. Multi joint arms are cool but unless that level of dexterity is needed then they are unnecessarily complicated. There is one thing I won’t compromise on, the drive train. A good drive train needs to fast, simple, powerful and reliable. Unless the game has some sort of odd terrain you can bank on 6 or 8 wheel drive, an Andymark transmission and the lowest chassis practical. There is no need to waste time on a new drive train unless the game demands it. I am also a fan of using cots parts whenever possible, it is faster and easier, if someone else has a proven design and it fits the budget then there is no reason to reengineer it.

 

The Season Schedule:

Getting the robot built quickly is important, I would rather have the robot with semi proven prototypes put together week 3 then have finished and refined prototypes that have never been combined on a full robot in week 5 or 6. Once the initial design is finalized it is time to test it, break it, improve it, and repeat… over and over until it is time to start building for next year. I would like to have the team build two robots but that will be determined by budget. I also plan to compete at at least two regionals but again that is assuming we can meet fundraising goals.

 

Between Now and Kickoff:

Obviously the first steps are finding a location, mentors and students, I’ll skip over this as it will be most of the blog content between now and September. Once the team is formed I think it is important to introduce students to design and some of the technical challenges. I believe VEX and/or FTC will play a big part in this. The area has an incredibly active STEM community including FLL, FTC, and VEX. I plan to get the team involved immediately, 95% of building a successful FRC bot is not in the actual construction of the robot. That 95% can largely be replicated using the other programs, the last 5% can be taught during build season assuming we have sufficient numbers of technical mentors.

 

Mentors:

I do not plan to have this team tied to a school; I believe we are going the 4-H route. This is in my opinion best for the area we are in; I will go into details in a later post. I am hoping to have somewhere on the order of 2 students to 1 mentor, this helps to ensure that students and mentors are working closely together. I believe I have a big pool of technical mentors to draw from; there is no shortage of companies in the area that we should be able to use. One thing that I have not gotten from another team (though I am sure I am not the first to want to do it) in not to treat the non-engineering jobs as jobs to hand off to parents and whoever is left sitting around. If you go into any company that employs engineers you will likely find that things like creating business plans, raising capital, booking travel, handling the logistics of running a group, and ordering parts are not simply handled by whoever doesn’t have enough to do (or in many FRC cases who ever already has too much to do but is too nice to say no). There are professionals that do all of these things, I believe that a truly successful team should draw on the community to bring in mentors in these areas as well. I might be being too idealistic here but now that I put it in writing if I don’t manage to do it then you guys can all point it out later.

 

This covers my major goals, and ideas (maybe better to say ideals), I have plans for other things, how to scout, how to train the mentors, ensuring grades don’t suffer, etc but for now I will leave it at this.

Finally Doing It!

Well I am not really sure who if anyone will be interested in this but I figured I would start a blog to document my efforts to get an FRC team started in Lynchburg, VA. Hopefully this blog will serve multiple purposes, the first and the real reason I am doing it is to keep myself honest about what I have done and what I need to do. Other than that if we have success hopefully this can serve as a resource for others, if  we fail then hopefully reading back through this will offer insight as to why and will let us correct the problems.

A little about me: I am a recent RPI graduate. My degree is in Computer Engineering, I accepted a position designing robotic control systems for AREVA NP in Lynchburg, VA after graduation. I started participating in FRC in 2005, as part of a rookie team at my high school. After two years as a student I graduated and went to RPI. While in college I mentored multiple FRC and FLL  teams. I graduated this past December and moved to Lynchburg. Before moving down here I contacted Virginia FIRST to try to find a team to mentor. The closest teams were about an hour away, I chose to work with a rookie team in Roanoke, VA (an hour from work)  I enjoyed working with them but the long commute did not allow for me to contribute as much as I would have liked. After the season I again contacted Virginia FIRST to express interest in starting a new team in the area. Since then I have been working with Pattie Cook and her team at Virginia FIRST to bring FRC back to the area.

Over the last 7 years I have definitely developed ideas on what needs to be done to make a team successful. Much of this has been drawn from posts and blogs by members of succesful teams as well as my own observations both of the teams I have worked with as well as of the other teams at competitions. I will be posting soon with an outline of what I think it takes to be successful and the approach I will be taking and recommending to the team as it forms. I have worked with 3 rookie teams 1568 in 2006, 3280 in 2010, and 3594 in 2011. All of these teams had different levels of experience, different levels of success, and different approaches to the competition. Of the three 3280 was the most successful taking home 6 awards during their 3 competitions their rookie season, and consistently seeding well within the top 8, I will be taking a lot of the lessons learned from that season and applying them to this team with the hope of similar results.

I hope this is a good introduction to who I am and what I am looking to do. Over the next day or two I will be posting more info about my goals and approach to starting the team as well as posting some information about the area and what I see as strengths and weaknesses.

-James