As our 2012 Build season continues to grow nearer, an event heralded by the countdown on the blog of FRC director Bill Miller, subteams continue their preparations for its arrival. The Green Machine’s animators have put their fullest efforts into a safety animation that highlights the importance that FIRST places on safety — whether in the workshop, at competitions or in the community-at-large. Anisha S., an animation subteam lead, summarizes the safety animation contest as “a 30-second clip where we show how safety lessons learned are applicable to other parts of our lives.” The focus this year is to underscore safety’s importance outside of just workshop safety and building a robot.
Team 1816’s submission this year is titled “Safety FIRST:Pass it On.” In addition to this challenge, the animation subteam has been working on building and modeling various common objects in Autodesk Maya, ahead of the unveiling of the Autodesk Visualization Challenge in early January. Another subteam that has been modeling and building parts is the Computer-Aided Design (CAD) subteam, which includes six rookies that are learning to use SolidWorks for the first time. This program, used by many engineering companies, is a step-up in versatility from various CAD programs taught in school. The CAD subteam, under the supervisory eye of lead Joe F., has been designing and building a set of super shifters in CAD. This kind of design allows a transmission to include both power and speed, as it would enable the robot to be switched between two separate drive train gearing ratios. Having practice now with SolidWorks, we hope to have a faster turnaround from idea to pencil sketch to CAD, which can test how it will really work in real-life on a robot.