Written By: Viki P, Ally L, Audrey T, and Rishi J
MinneTrials Updates!
This year we are super excited to bring YOU updates on our MinneTrials teams and their progress throughout the season! Due to the large amount of rookies we had interested in participating, our team has split into two MinneTrials teams: Team Whimsy and Purple Team (names subject to change). Both teams will have their perspective on the week shared in these posts, with a different member writing each time. Whether you’re family, a friend/team member, or another team looking for inspiration, we hope you find these as interesting and helpful as our weekly updates during our offical season!
If you’re a student and interested in joining, you still can! Find more info here
Team Whimsy
The Opening Credits – Monday
Filling up our popcorn buckets and settling in, Minnetrials Kickoff was upon us! For our very first open room dedicated to Minnetrials, we started with getting to know the game manual like the back of our hands. Everyone was on the lookout for any loopholes we could take advantage of and what the most crucial points were. This included ranking points which are given to teams no matter if they won or lost their match and affect where they stand in the tournament.
The wonderful build captain, Ally, and our deputies, Brooke-Lynn and Will, led the discussion with the help of a very tall dry erase board. That way, we could give Ally’s arm a workout and make sure all ideas were acknowledged.
But first, Team Whimsy outlined what we needed to do, what we hoped to do, and what we could not do. Setting realistic goals with what we have is a tried and true tactic to make sure we aren’t over our heads. By prioritizing popcorn (tennis balls) and leaving the butter game piece as a want, we were free to start thinking about what intake we wanted to pursue. The race was on. A tie between an intake by picking pieces off the ground or through the human player stations.
Trips to the snack closet were taken. Awesome pros and cons were given until the vote was in….7:1 ground v human player. But don’t flip out, it’s just brainstorming! Once we get into prototyping, then we’ll know for sure what our best chance is.
To end the afternoon off, we brainstormed mechanisms. Looking back fondly on the 2017 FRC Steampunks Game, one that also utilized tennis balls, and exploring as many ground intake types as possible, we had our work cut out for us. After we took a small break to attend an Outreach meeting, Team Whimsy went home for the day with high hopes for our Minnetrials robot.
I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! – Wednesday
Wednesday was an important day for prototyping, the game pieces arrived! The official pieces for this year’s game, Popcorn Premeire, are Popcorn and Butter. The Popcorn is a tennis ball, about 2.6-inches in diameter. The Butter is an 8-inch foam cube. One way to score lots of points is putting them together in the Popcorn Bucket!
The game pieces arriving meant we could test our intake protoype that we can CADed on Monday. Our intake worked super well, being able to work on both the Popcorn and Butter! We kept up work on the prototype, testing different types of wheels to see how we could improve. Hopefully we can get the intake in a good spot to work with both our lovely game pieces over the next open room!
Purple Team
MinneTrials Kickoff! – Monday
For the first day of Minnetrials, the Purple team decided to shoot our head mentor with tennis balls! For those unacquainted – Minnetrials is a mock FRC season that is run before the actual competition season. It is limited to team members with less experience as a way to educate them and get them some experience building robots before they do it for real during the competition season. This being said, Minnetrial’s rules are much more laid-back in order to give the newer members an easier time. This year’s game involves shooting tennis balls called popcorn into a box called the kettle, and scoring foam cubes called butter into a melting station in order to make popcorn buckets!
Before our tennis ball tomfoolery, we had some important things to take care of on kickoff. The first thing we had to do was figure out what the Minnetrails game looked like. Therefore, the Purple team spent the first few hours of open room reading through the rule book and then leading a discussion about what the best way to play the game was. We decided that we would focus on scoring popcorn (the tennis balls) into the kettle, and if we had time we would attempt to process butter.
At this point, we had been reading through rulebooks and having heated discussion for a few hours, so we decided to take a break and go frolic in the grass – an extremely robotics-related activity.
After playing in the grass, we started prototyping individual mechanisms on our robot. We prototype mechanisms to make sure that our ideas actually work, and to figure out the specifics of how the game pieces interact with our robot. We spent the rest of room prototyping an intake for popcorn that was simply a wheel and a ramp. It worked a bit too well though – the tennis ball intake turned into a shooter! We didn’t have much time left in the day at this point, so we decided to have some fun and shoot tennis balls at people.
Overall, Purple team had a productive kickoff – we went from having no clue what the Minnetrials game was to having a working prototype, knowing what we wanted to build, and shooting our first tennis balls haphazardly across the room!
Tumbling Tennis Balls – Wednesday
We went into the second day of Minnetrials with a dedicated plan – to finish our prototyping. At this point we only had to figure out how to store and then subsequently shoot the popcorn out of our robot. We decided that we would have a funnel that acted as a reservoir leading into a compliant (squishy) wheel that stopped the tennis balls from entering our shooter unless it was powered. The shooter was just a wheel that sent the tennis ball flying via a ramp.
Building the prototype went pretty smoothly though it took most of room – after it was done we went outside and started sending the popcorn flying. It was very entertaining to try to catch the tennis balls, considering how inaccurate our shooter was at this point – our shooting wheel wasn’t centered, causing balls to go very far right. Furthermore, we had access to a bunch of tennis balls, and we naturally threw them at each other and fooled around. We had a few funny failures too – one of the tennis balls got caught between the shooter wheel and the supporting wall!
While we didn’t do as many things as we did on Monday, what we did in room on Wednesday was still very beneficial – at this point we had prototyped the intake and shooting of popcorn in our robot! This meant that starting Monday, we could work on making the CAD of the robot – a 3d model that we make in order to help us build our final design.
Stay Connected With Us During The Entire Season!
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