23-24 Week of 4/22 – 4/26

We took a short hiatus updating our blog due to the April Break, but we are back up and running now to the end of the school year.

Last week Junior Aaron BenDaniel was helping to put the finishing touches on the Robotics Team’s technical documents. These need to be submitted prior to the regional finals. He writes on his website:

April break was last week, the robotics team did a lot of practice over the week and Jonas is hopefully well expierenced in piloting JONA now.

Of course, we will continue to practice, but hopefully we should be pretty good for the competion now.

All of our documention is due on April 26, so this week we’ve been extremely busy writing it. I wrote a bunch of stuff a while ago, so we haven’t actually needed to write everything this week. But still, we did end up writing quite a bit.

I also made an SID for JONA, which introduced me to the webapp LucidChart. It’s…. fine, but there are a few things that I find annoying about it.

See photos and copies of the documents on his website, linked here.

Senior Roman Rice addressed some issues with his circuit board for the autonomous vehicle project. He states on his website:

This week I assembled a new circuit board that fixes problems with the old circuit board. Because this circuit board fixes the problems with the old one, it works better. This circuitboard is also smaller, so it takes up much less space as compared to the old design which took up far more space than what was required to accomplish its purpose.

Posted: 8 FEB 2024

Week of 26 APR 2024

The image on the bottom is the new revised circuit board design. As can be seen by the picture, the design if far more compact and wherever possible replaces larger components with more distinct functions with more application specific integrated solutions.

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What is also most important is that this revision of the circuit board no longer uses PMOS transistors. The fact that the controller must be driven by a voltage of more than +12V, and sometimes more than +72V, (a positive voltage) means that NMOS would not be effective in solving this problem and that using PMOS, we will see many difficulties in driving the gate. As such this was replaced by an IC.

He provides images of the circuit board on his website, linked here.

We are only a week or two away from the completed Sumobots. Most teams have running bots, and are now just putting on the finishing touches. We are looking forward to hosting the Sumobot contest soon.

Lastly, we want to welcome our new freshmen to the shop. This year we have 13 outstanding individuals who have decided to join the shop for the next 3 1/4 years. We look forward to working with Quinn, Ryan, Lila, Sydney, Tim, Adam, Ben, Alex, Miles, Andrew, Asiya, Victor, and Jonas. Welcome!