Cardboard Crazy!

The team is off and running! We are having a good start to the season. Chairman's is working on a social experiment at the Warren Newport Public Library. A video will be put up on our Youtube channel soon showing off our results.

The rest of the team separated into small strategy groups and started discussing components for the upcoming robot. In their small groups, teams came up with various ideas, then made cardboard prototypes which they presented to the team. Together everyone voted on which design they liked the best by utilizing a decision matrix. The decision matrix balances the pros and cons of each design in different categories. The best design will end up getting the highest score.

Stay tuned to see which designed won!

Kick-Off!

It’s finally time for Kick-Off! On Saturday January 9th we held our FRC Kick-Off event at the O’Plaine campus. All team members showed up bright and early at 9 am along with team mentors, team alumni, and parents to watch the live broadcast of this year’s game. Trident Robotics is extremely excited to be participating in FIRST Stronghold, a medieval themed tower defense style game that is full of action and excitement! After watching the live broadcast, we split off into small groups and read every detail of the FIRST Stronghold game manual. The groups came back together to present their findings to the team and start to develop strategies. We now have six weeks of hard work ahead of us, and we hope that we can have your continued support.

Gift-Wrapping at Pleasant Prairie Outlet Mall

One of the best parts of the holiday season is wrapping presents! Trident Robotics visited Pleasant Prairie Premium Outlets to hold a volunteer event in partnership with the Simon Youth Foundation on December 21st and 22nd. A few members from each sub team were able to wrap presents for customers at the mall while also raising money for the Simon Youth Foundation, whose mission is to foster and improve educational opportunities, career development, and life skills that transform the lives of youth. This event was a great way to expand our presence in the community outside of Lake County, while also forming an alliance with a great organization.

All About that Swerve Drive

Hey Everyone!


Today the team is relaxing from the hectic meeting on Saturday. The team had an amazing team building cookout. We built up an appetite after playing an intense game of football. Then the team members grilled delicious cheeseburgers and hot dogs. Afterwards, Chairman's made a hilarious "What's in the box video" where team members touched random things in a box with a blindfold on. Be sure to go and check it out at the Warren Robotics Youtube page in the next week or so! Currently, Chairman's is working on editing the video. Meanwhile, Design and Fabrication is working on cutting out the acrylic control board for the swerve drive. The swerve drive is an important piece in the robot that allows you to control each individual wheel separately. This allows more mobility in the robot. Additionally, Controls is having tasty pizza while working on wiring up the encoders. Members on controls said that the season has been fun so far and it has been a wonderful experience because of the collaborative group. Saturday was a great day, but the team has to get back to work!

Food Bank Bonanza!

Hey Everyone!

          Last Saturday, almost half the team visited the Northern Illinois Food Bank and helped out. Our team has gotten lots of help from the mayor and our community in general, so it was great to give back to the community who has helped us so much. The Northern Illinois Food Bank is committed to solving world hunger by providing nutritious meals to the impoverished in the Boone, DuPage, DeKalb, Grundy, Kane, Kankakee, Kendall, Lake, McHenry, Ogle, Stephenson, Will, and Winnebago counties. The team members started out by unloading food from the truck, sorting it, and then organizing it into an assembly line. Later, when people started coming in, they helped them pick out and load their food into their cars. Overall, the whole experience was fun and rewarding for everyone. The team members that went enjoyed the experience a lot, and said they would do it again. Look out for a blog post in the coming weeks about our next community outreach event at Feed My Starving Children!

The Final Push

This weekend the team met Saturday, Sunday, and Monday from 8am to 4pm and even later. Chairman’s team has continued working on their Chairman’s award video. They have also begun editing and finalizing their essays for the Dean’s Award and the Chairman’s Award. With the build season coming to a close Chairman’s takes pride in reflecting on this season and even past seasons as they write of our teams successes in their award essays. Saturday the team received their tie-dye hoodies that they will be wearing this year during competitions. Everybody wore them on Monday for a team picture. In regards to the robot, before bag and tag last night Programming team made sure that their code was functional and ready for competition. Safety team continued working on the pit pieces. Mechanical team and Design team made last minute fine adjustments to the robot, while Controls team wired the controls board for the practice robot and hooked up the LED lights and sensors.  

LEGO Outreach Program

Yesterday members from Chairman’s team met in the printing lab to work on producing the shirts for our STEMbots outreach program. Today they opened up the Lego kits to test them out and get a feel for the sets they would be helping the kids create. Tomorrow elementary and middle school children will be coming for the outreach program. The plan is for them to use the Lego Education WeDo STEM Classroom packs to experience a series of cross-curricular theme-based activities while developing their skills in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, language, literacy, and social studies. Through the piloting of our Lego outreach activities we hope to be able to create a summer program to further teach children about Robotics. Members of Chairman’s are also creating poster designs for the Midwest Regional. While Chairman’s has been hard at work editing their Chairman’s award video, Programming, Mechanical, Controls, and Design team have been working together on building and maintaining the robot. They have been persisting recently with redesigning mechanisms for the robot as they have experienced problems with some of their previous designs.