Triple Helix builds bumpers
Last summer we showed you how to build a west coast style drive train… Now we’ll show you how to make pretty bumpers to protect it in the heat of competition!
Last summer we showed you how to build a west coast style drive train… Now we’ll show you how to make pretty bumpers to protect it in the heat of competition!
Triple Helix Tech Tips are an idea we’ve been mulling for a while. This is where we share our tips and tricks, which we hope will be useful especially for rookie teams. We’ve been around a while, and have learned some lessons, sometimes the hard way. Hopefully these will save you a little pain, a little time, and a little cash.
When we recruit new students, one of our favorite lines is, “Nobody who joins the team knows how to build a robot. We’ll teach you.” As an established team, we go to competitions and see younger teams, some of whom don’t have engineering mentors, struggling to learn lessons we have learned the hard way. We see our role in growing FRC as helping those struggling teams become better more quickly, so they remain inspired, and don’t fold.
Last fall our students came up with the idea of producing a series of instructional videos. These would teach our incoming rookies the skills they would need to be productive robot builders. We see this video series, and the ones which will follow, as a tool which can help educate inexperienced students on our own team as well as other teams across FRC.
During the quarter-finals of our last competition, our Pilot looked out over the field and noted that 3 of the teams of the field were using our climbing ropes, one of which was on the opposing alliance. After seeing so many posts about ropes failing in competition, 2363 has decided to share our method for making ropes with the FRC community.
Triple Helix is the award-winning competitive robotics team of Menchville High School in Newport News, Virginia. The team competes in the FIRST Robotics Competition as Team 2363. Through our work as a team and our outreach efforts across Hampton Roads, we aim to effect a fundamental change that enables our community’s youth a greater access to science, math, and engineering as possible career choices.