Week 2: Finals are 'Final'ly Over!

Hello blog! Welcome to Deep Space Week 2! I'll keep this intro short as we go into what we've been up to this week! Also keep an eye out for our new Build Season Vlog which will be coming out soon!

Sadly, we had final exams this week so our shop was closed from last Saturday to this Thursday. We've been sure to make up lost time by getting right back into shop though! 

This Friday we had our annual Quizzo event, a trivia night we host. We not only do 10 rounds of trivia, but we raffle off baskets and do 50/50! This year our very own Mr. Palac won the 50/50! We thank everyone who made this night through donating baskets and sponsoring the event. Also, a huge shout out to our school, the Mount Saint Joseph Academy, who always allow us to hold this event and to Mrs. Gregori who is the main reason this night runs so smoothly!

Build Update:
Our builders have made A LOT of progressive this past week. We have:

• started our main frame
• almost completed all of the working parts for the climbing mechanism
• made modifications to the hatch mechanism to remove all pneumatics on our robot
• have removed all wood and cardboard from cargo mechanism
• started a prototype to lift the cargo mechanism
• made handles for our X-Carve tables
  • and used the X-Carve A LOT
• used CAD to map out our robot
• learned that everything relates back to math!

As we head into Week 3, we have high hopes of the progress we'll make!

Chairman's Update:
Though I could update you all on Chairman's in long winded bullet points, our amazing Business Vice President and head Chairman's girl Dariya best explains it, "Hard at work this week, the Chairman's team finished the first draft of the essay! (This is the fastest they've finished it in a couple of years, so they're very excited). Also they began planning their theme, let's just say, stars are aligning for this to be a perfect presentation. *winky emoji & star emoji*"

Programming Update:
Since we discovered other people write much better paragraphs than I do, we now have our lovely President and Head Programmer Kate talk a little bit more about the work on the programming side, "For the past two years, our programming team has been functioning under a philosophy we like to call, 'Type now, research (maybe) later.' This year, our programmers are taking a different route. With the new challenges of the Sandstorm Period and vision processing, Junior and Senior Programmers have been researching extensively and have succeeded in getting their Raspberry Pi up and running. Now they are working toward both displaying image streams on the SmartDashboard and processing images using GRIP. The sophomores and Freshman Programmers this week upgraded a past robot to run with 2019 FRC code. They now have that robot running basic autonomous program with two cameras for our drivers to use when simulating the sandstorm period. They have also begun to experiment with a few different types of sensors to determine which ones we want to use on our 2019 robot. Gooo Programming!"

Important Media Update!!!
STARTING TODAY WE ARE DOING A 20TH ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL! We will be posting every Monday through Friday a throwback photo starting from 1999 all the way to 2019! So make sure to keep an eye on our Instagram (@firebirds433) and share it with all your friends!

So that is all my birdies! We hope to see you next week! Keep building and don't go crazy as we start Week 3!

Follow Us on Social Media!
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5IQluJKZTs1HG3n6yprTGg 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/firebirds43...
Twitter: https://twitter.com/firebirds433
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/firebirds433/
Snapchat: firebirds433