Team Update

The SOTAbots have been working hard for the past month. With three days left until STOP BUILD, the SOTAbots are very busy bees.

The Media subteam is creating and finishing the team’s themed t shirt, safety pamphlets, and team information brochures. They filmed two more interviews for the Chairman’s Video with our build and Outreach members and mentors. The majority of the filming is done, and they have been editing the clips and finding the golden nuggets of film to create the video.

The Awards team finished submitting multiple awards. They turned in the Woodie Flowers award the day before it was due, and a small celebration took place within the small subteam. Just before dinner that night, a small group of dedicated Chairman’s Committee members congregated to turn in the Chairman’s Award, and a great hurrah was raised by the SOTAbots. The next week, they turned in the Entrepreneurship Award after many collaborative hours of wordsmithing. The Awards subteam is continuing to add to the Engineering Notebook for transparent documentation and as a basis for the Engineering Inspiration Award.

The Business subteam has been preparing for the SOTAbots up-and-coming Power Up to Houston Benefit Auction on March 11th 12-2pm. They have been working on gathering auction items and organizing food for the light lunch. The purpose of the auction is to raise money to sustain and grow our many Outreach programs. All are welcome; you can learn more about this event and RSVP to attend at sotabots.com!

The Build team has been working on our practice and competition robots for the past month, and have just finished the practice robot! They have finished the drive train, complete with a butterfly module system, the cube intake mechanism, and the cascade lift mechanism. The only parts of the robot subject to the time crunch is our endgame mechanism, pneumatic systems and the electronics.

The Programming subteam have their hands on the Practice Robot a little while ago, and are attaching control buttons to different robot functions to ready the robot to drive. With the Competition Robot still underway, they haven’t gotten a chance to program it, but they will soon do so. Two of their team members have also being working on Lidar and Vision for our robots, and are getting close to done.

The Outreach subteam has been hard at work, retaining connections with schools and organizations. Since the end of miniterm, we have gone to Mary Lyon Elementary, with two of our members spending hours with 5th graders, talking about STEAM. We have also gone to the Children’s Museum, and five members were interviewed about SPARK. The bi-weekly trips to Mary Bridge have also been ongoing, and we even presented at the ELC Welcome night for incoming freshmen, informing them about robotics and STEAM.

Overall, this past month has been chalk-full of action and hard work, and the season is just beginning.

Written by: Silver Lippert