About Ian McCloskey

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So far Ian McCloskey has created 2 blog entries.

By |2025-03-19T17:30:02-07:00March 19th, 2025|

On Monday, the team made significant progress in assembling key parts of the robot. With our new designs coming together, we focused on refining vision alignment by retesting the angle and direction of the camera for auto on the old robot, ensuring it properly detected AprilTags for more precise movement. Meanwhile, our driver continued practicing, further improving his skills to maximize our robot’s performance on the field. The control systems team worked on crimping the e-chain. Additionally, we finished assembling our third elevator of the season. We also had many students in the classroom building spare subsystems for Vantage and disassembling subsystems from the older iteration for spare parts. They labeled them and packed them into our pit and trailer. At the end of the day, we finished wiring and tested the new coral and algae scoring mechanism on our field, running a few cycles to check for reliability. We also worked on organizing the pit, making sure everything had a designated spot to make setup easier at competition. We checked our packing list multiple times to ensure we had all necessary tools and backup parts. Once everything was prepared, we loaded up our trailer and sent it off to the competition. We also posted our robot teaser, which was exciting to finally share after all the work that [...]

By |2024-12-09T19:18:05-08:00December 2nd, 2024|

During the 2024  fall season for Iron Claw Robotics, team 972, we began driver training much earlier than in previous years. We started the process in mid/late September to give new and returning students a chance to try out our last year's competition robot, Vivace. Although initial attempts to provide time for students to get accustomed to the robot did not succeed due to technical issues with tape strength, wheels, and an inconsistent area to drive, improvements in field setup meant that with each practice, we were able to get more and more time to drive. In mid-October, we decided that we were ready to have driver tryouts and set a date for the 27th of October. For driver tryouts, we brought out each student who wanted to become the driver one at a time to complete certain tasks in front of a group of evaluators consisting of the team captains. These tasks included weaving through cones, driving in circles while keeping the robot pointed at a target, driving in a straight line, and driving in figure eight. Throughout these tests, the students were timed and penalized if they hit either one of the cones being used to make the course or the foam balls at the edge of the field. Once the tryouts were done the captains reviewed [...]

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