On September 24, the N.E.R.D.S team gathered at Mr. Gerald Nelson’s house for a meeting. Those in attendance were Evan Nothstine, Caden Peck, Reece Green, Kevin Henggeler, Dick Ross, Dakota Wagner, and of course, Mr. Nelson. All were called into the garage, and the meeting began.
The meeting started with light chat as we disassembled the arena from the previous year and further cleaned it. After this was finished, the group moved into the house of Mr. Nelson to discuss other matters. No members had registered yet, and were instructed on how to do so. After this was settled, (the more forgetful members handed notes) the N.E.R.D.S moved on to discuss strategy. There were many points in big jobs like scoring with cap balls (point scoring exercise balls) or pushing color coded buttons autonomously. The team reaffirmed their original consensus: We would devote our robot to scoring the big points, and ignore all else. The game plan so far was decided, but easily subject to change. We would first activate during autonomous mode, knocking a cap ball of of it’s designated stand for points, driving further on and pressing a beacon button using Vuforia. To learn about Vuforia, please click here. After using Vuforia to track the sensor photo, we would press the button corresponding to our team, then turn back and park in one of the corner ramps. This would start us off with a hefty amount of points. When the driver control period began, we would back off the ramp and go around claiming as many beacons by pressing their buttons like in autonomous. We would also make an effort to shoot the pre-loaded point balls given to us into the center vortex hoops. As the end game began, we would lift the cap ball of our color into the corresponding vortex hoop, and end the game with many points. It was at this time that the team decided to head back to the garage and begin to assemble the new playing field. (If any references to the challenge confuse you, please visit our previous posts on the matter.)