2023-2024 Executives
President: Lauren Killingsworth
Vice-President: Andrew Ruzicka
Systems Engineer: Kevin Buss
Electrical/Pneumatics Captain: Ray Meier
Programing Captain: Reid Akers
Mechanical Captain: Robert Shull
2022-2023 Executives
President: Jason Buss
Vice-President: Andrew Ruzicka
Secretary: Lauren Killingsworth
Public Relations: Lauren Killingsworth
Media Specialist: Lauren Killingsworth
Electrical Captain: Ray Meier
Mechanical Captain: Kevin Buss
Programing Captain: Ries Brady
Pneumatics Captain: Damir Lipovac
Build Sessions
Some of the pictures that have been taken at our build sessions. Exciting Stuff!!
Pneumatics
Ratchet Rockers Visit
Last Saturday we took a trip to team 1706, Ratchet Rockers, located in Wentzville Missouri. Local teams including us were invited to come and test some robots utilizing the Ratchet Rockers field. This was a wonderful learning experience and a great way test one of our own robot chassis’ on a full scale field. It was great seeing all the different prototypes surrounding schools have and being able to talk about possible game strategies ahead of time.
Find The Cure
What is it?
Find The Cure was a competition we made and held during covid time. Our mentor Dr. James Kreyling made all the game pieces and the challenges we had to do. We invited some nearby schools and teams to participate in the competition. Oakville high school had 1 robot at the competition. Mehlville high school had 3 robots at the competition and then we had Hancock high school come up with 1 robot for the competition. The competition ended up being a mix between FRC and FTC they could make a robot either way, but everyone did FRC-styled bots.
The challenge was pulling a chain and pressing a button. When pressing the button, the goal was to press it as many times as you could in the time frame you were given. There was a 60-second time in between each time you could press it so you couldn’t just sit there and hold the button or spam the button. By pulling the chain
Why did we do it?
We wanted to do this since covid was going on there were going to be no in-person FRC competitions. They were going to have an in-person FTC competition, but we didn’t want to lose rookie status by signing up for FTC when we wanted to have FRC rookie status. With these things going on we made the decision to make our own competition for people to come to. This is when we came up with the idea of the Find The Cure competition.
FTC Source Code is now generally available
Our code from previous years is now public. This used to be tracked with a single flash drive, however with the transition to GitHub and source control, its now available publicly for anyone to view.
There is no version control and there is little documentation in areas, and there is no maintenance done to the code outside of organization and uploading to GitHub.
To view: https://github.com/OakvilleDynamics/ohsrobotics-archive to browse around.
Our other GitHub repos are also generally available!
Catching up to the new season with 9328 team captain, Jake Walters!
It’s been awhile since our last post so we wanted to take this time to tell everyone how this year has been starting off. We started off this year with our first meeting on the 23rd of August, where we elected new executives and welcomed our new members. On the 8th of September we learned our new theme for the game this year, which is called Rover Ruckus. This year its completely different than any other year and is the most complex it has been in a long time. The sponsorship and fundraising scene is also different as other years. We’ve planned for different levels of sponsorship based on how much is given. (Those levels will be finalized and posted onto this website later in the Month) Along with a new face to the Sponsorship’s, the teams have been looking into different Colleges and creating part lists for our existing partners to fulfill. In the end, we look to have a great year for Robotics and have a bright future. Till next time!
This Year’s Return: Robotics Club
This year has been hectic for a majority of the Robotics veterans, many who are juniors and seniors starting to take on more responsibilities in and out of the club. We’ve gone through a bit or reorganization and have focused a significant amount of our efforts on fundraising in a joint effort this Robotics club and Oakville’s Technology Students Association (TSA) club. A big priority for us was to make sure that the newer members wouldn’t be disadvantaged as us seniors will have to depart from the team once we graduate.
Our coach, Dr. Kreyling, had to consolidate all his classes and clubs into a single room. He runs most of the school’s PLTW engineering courses and oversees the robotic club, TSA, and Oakville Key Club, so it was fairly difficult to suddenly have less than half the space for everything. But some of our robotics members, including me, helped him compact everything that was needed into and room. Despite the ordeal we actually now have a great advantage just from how well organized everything is. Dr. Kreyling’s room is still quite large, although I wish there was a sink in here to wash our hands periodically.
For the fall season we now have new executive positions and team captains. Here’s the list.
President: Thomas Gleiforst
Vice-president: Alisa Lazareva
Secretary: Nicole Neher
Public relations: Hannah Jokuti
Media Specialist: Tommy Dong
Team 9328 Captain: Sheldon Salins
Co-captain: Joseph Baltz
Team 9612 Captain: Nick DeLucia
Co-captain: Nate Pruitt
With new and old executives and team members and a more organized club, the two teams have been working on their respective designs and robots. Expect new updates from both teams as well as some photos and videos from me about some of the stuff we’ve done this year.
Also, here’s a short video of a few of us working on a Robotics float for Oakville’s homecoming parade (you can skip the end where it stops being robotics related). Enjoy!
Catching up with Team 9612
Team 9612 has been very successful this year, placing 4th in our first meet at Lutheran High School in St. Charles. Our original concept was a robot that would use a scissor lift to raise the yoga ball on top of the vortex, two wheels with weather stripping to suck balls in, and two wheels to launch them up a curved ramp into the center vortex. At the first meet, none of that happened; we had a scissor lift, but it was unreliable, needing way too much fixing that we didn’t have time for. We just played “the beacon game,” and managed to place 4th.
Between that meet on 12/10/16 and our first qualifier on 1/7/17, we made a lot of massive changes. For starters, we decided that Tetrix parts were too unreliable, so, with Dr. Kreyling’s guidance, we made almost the entire robot out of steel. Now, the scissor lift works beautifully. The suck mechanism looked like it would work, but it was a little iffy. When we got to the qualifier, we found a number of problems. The arms to pick up the yoga ball got stuck nearly every time, so we weren’t able to cap the vortex in any of our matches. Our ball collection mechanism just flat out didn’t work, so we scratched that too. Again, we just played the beacon game. We placed 6th overall, and we were the 3rd place Alliance Captain’s first round pick. Our alliance lost every game, but it was a the best an Oakville Robotics team has ever done.
Now, we are preparing for our second meet tomorrow. The scissor lift works perfectly, now featuring double motors with double the torque, so it should be way faster too. Our ball collection and shooting mechanism is nearly completed, but we will update with the specifics on that after our competition tomorrow. We are currently in 16th place in the NE Division, and the top 18 advance to the Conference Qualifier in Rolla, so we are hoping to do great at this meet, securing ourselves a position at that qualifier.