03/04/2021
Hello UWRT! Happy March!
This month in UWRT: Every Sunday 12:00 pm ET S'ups! - Come join us for our team meeting to hear about weekly updates! You can find the zoom link in teams!
Elections: Elections will be on Sunday, March 14th during S'Ups (join with usual zoom link). Please attend to vote on our next president and vice president. Votes will only be counted for those in the zoom!
Shoutouts: Each month we will be shouting out team members who are making a difference!
Robbert Pafford! Robert, you were nominated for your tremendous effort on your projects. It has been noted that you are working very long hours to make sure everything is getting done. Your work exceeds expectation and you have been able to complete many projects for the electrical team in your short tenure!
Caroline Eggett, Gretchen Stommel, Christina Javorka, and Sydnie Truesdale! Welcome to the team! We appreciate your work so far and your quick learning!
This year's leadership! With elections coming up, thank you for your leadership and guidance on the team this year! For those of you graduating, you will be missed!
Sub-team Meetings and Updates:
Electrical: Every Thursday 7:00 pm ET Electrical meeting! - Please join using the link on the electrical channel on teams. This past month, the electrical team has entered a bit of a slow season as we await orders to be placed and received. We have finalized the first round boards for Titan and are working through some speed bumps getting them manufactured. The boards team has spent most of this down time working on the order sheet for parts. In addition, we have started a few new projects. We are working on a connector breakout board for the camera cage side of Titan, so that we can simplify the wiring from the electronics cage to the camera cage, and we are working diligently on cabling needs. We have spent a little time in the shop recently working to put together a rough prototype of our actuator torpedo circuit, and have started investigating some of the lingering issues with Puddles. Lastly, the electrical team has taken a large step forward with developing new firmware for the actuator board, new firmware for the copro board, and a new ROS driver for the copro. The new versions of the firmware are being designed to work with puddles and Titan without any major changes in the code. Although the electrical team is in a bit of a slow season, we are still hard at work hoping to avoid a burn from the creeping deadlines.
Software:
Software’s main meeting is Sunday after S’ups. Project teams generally also meet mid-week on a project team-specific basis. If you’re interested in what the Software team does or want to get involved, get in touch with Anden via Teams PM, [email protected], or just show up at a meeting! The Software Team is all settled in for the semester and has been chipping away at our projects! Our Navigation team has finished up some building blocks and is nearing some working prototypes for the Gate and Buoy tasks, as well as working towards prequalification during our next pool test. Our Perception team is successfully generating some basic data for the Buoys to feed into our vision training system, and is making small improvements and tweaks week-by-week to improve its accuracy. Lastly, our Mapping team has everything put together and is starting to test a basic prototype in the simulator (which will probably break, but it’s all theoretically working!!!). Software has a lot planned for our next pool test, which is planned for the week of the 14th-21st! We will be testing what we didn’t get around to last pool test (Script Ohio, Drag Calibration, MoveIt Trajectory Testing) as well as some new things (Pole Detection, the Mapping System, Gate/Buoy Tasks, Prequalification). We hope to do a mock run of the pool test a few nights beforehand in the simulator similar to last time, so be on the lookout for that!
Business:
Every Monday 6:00 pm ET Business meeting! - For zoom link please PM Julia Gerard (gerard.52) on teams. We now have more of a formalized business team! The business team is working on a few new projects this month focusing on social media posts, team apparel, and sponsor relations. If anyone is still interested in getting involved, feel free to reach out to gerard.52!
Mechanical:
Every Tuesday 7:00 pm ET Mechanical Meeting! - please reach out to tosh.8 for more information. The month of February has been very productive for the Mechanical team! We've been hard at work machining parts for our new robot, Project Titan. The team is done with the wings, and is almost done with the internal electronics cages. We're getting some of the more complex parts machined by outside vendors, and we're excited to get those in and start assembling our new robot! As always, If you're interested in learning hands-on Mechanical Engineering skills, reach out to Patrick Tosh at [email protected]
Meet the Team Monday: If you follow our instagram, you will notice that we post meet the team Monday's where we share a bit about each of our team members. We will be giving all active members the chance to take part in the posts this year! Currently, we are looking for anyone that would like to be featured on the team instagram! Please PM Julia Gerard (gerard.52) on Teams if you are interested.
2021 Sponsors: As always, if you have contacts at any company or a company you think would be a good fit please reach out to Julia Gerard (gerard.52).You can view our current sponsors and sponsorship packet on our website (uwrt.club)! Feel free to share with anyone you think might want to help out! If you are interested in helping us contact sponsors- please reach out to Parth Parekh (parekh.86) or Julia Gerard (gerard.52)!
Membership:
Join UWRT today! If you're ready to become an official member please fill out our membership form on our website (uwrt.club). Feel free to direct specific questions to our executive board.
Collin Barack - President - barack.4
Parth Parekh - Vice President - parekh.86
Julia Gerard - Treasurer/Business - gerard.52
Flip Barker - Electrical - barker.569
Patrick Tosh - Mechanical - tosh.8
Anden Acitelli - Software - acitelli.2
Blaine Miller - Project Lead - miller.8545
