Spongebob Observation

This year our team was presented with the opportunity to create a costume for a child’s wheelchair. Natasha was the one to hear about this project first. She began talking to Ryan Weimer the head of the organization and he was more than willing to let us help. The organization’s name is Magic Wheelchair and their hope is to be able to make every kid in a wheelchair smile with their unique costumes. Needless to say, when Natasha presented the team with this opportunity, everyone was very excited to be able to use their robotics skills to make someone happy.
Ryan Weimer met with our team on September 25, 2015 to officially present us with the task; although, Natasha had been telling them bits and pieces overtime as she corresponded with Ryan. During the presentation, Ryan informed us that we would be building the mechanics for a SpongeBob figure. He drew a basic skeleton that we could use as a guide for building, as well as, basic dimensions. The dimension were to be 1.5ft wide by 2ft tall and we were not given a width dimension. Overall, Ryan was very excited to meet our team. He was also highly impressed with the level of complexity that we have to understand in order to compete in FTC. After Ryan
Our team had to wire, build, and program in an unfamiliar IDE. In order to make all of the function of SpongeBob work, soldering was required. This was difficult because it has to be done very precisely. Building became a challenge when we were not given any dimensions or designs to go off of. This made us create our own. Finally, programming stretched the abilities of our programmers because they were working in an unfamiliar environment and with some components that they had never used before. Despite the fact that we hit many road bumps along the way, this project helped us further many skills that are essential to robotics. We expanded our knowledge of engineering and design and in doing so we made someone’s day