Bear Metal Prototyping Challenge 2024 Update

With the power outages here in Maple Valley, our prototyping teams haven’t had the opportunity to work on their projects. Now that the majority of King County’s power is restored we’ve been able to resume our challenge.

At the start of the day, teams got back to working on finalizing their design, if they hadn’t finished it already. For their design to be complete, it must be entirely represented in CAD. This is done by members of the Design sub-team. After the design has or was finalized the members of the Fabrication sub-team work on their prototyping team's design, by machining the individual plates and other parts based on the designs specifications.  After the Fabrication members have manufactured the parts, they pass the completed components to the Assembly sub-team. The Assembly members hunt down the other miscellaneous parts and tools they need to assemble the mechanical parts. The sub-team grabs parts and tools like Allen keys (Allen wrenches), rivet guns, loctite, stand-offs, 10-32 screws, ect. 

Then, Electronics installs the motors, motor controllers, Power Distribution Hub, Voltage Regulation Module, etc. However, due to this being a Prototyping challenge, Electronics only needs to attach the motors and motor controllers. While all that is happening our Programming sub-team. After all that passing around the (prototyping) team comes together and tests, improves, repairs, and finalizes their design for the game, which has been explained in the previous blog HERE. All these prototyping teams will compete against each other using the mechanisms they built, tomorrow.

As this has been going on, our Business sub-team has been working on extra projects to hone their skills and to facilitate our team's path to a good impact essay.

Our GPT (General Prototyping Team) and Programing sub-teams have their own unique Prototyping Challenge. Programming is coding the collector and indexer for the robot teams to attach their mechanism to. GPT is coding a scouting app for the Prototyping Challenge, in preparation for our competition season.