Team 171 - Cheese Curd Herd
My first official robotics experience was with my local FIRST Robotics team, FRC Team 171. It was a joint effort between Platteville High School students and UW-Platteville students who were our mentors. This is where I got my first experience with CAD, 3D printing, machining, programming, and electronics. Once I got the robotics bug, I was hooked and never went back. The team was very close-knit and I was able to make some great friends and memories.
The FRC season is a 6 week period where teams are given a new challenge and must design, build, and program a robot to compete in the challenge. It is a very intense but rewarding experience. During season I would spend upwards of 40 hours a week working on the robot because once those six weeks were up we had to bag it up and couldn’t touch it until the competition. Once competition season came around, we would spend our weekends traveling to different events to compete with our robot against other teams from around the midwest.
Once of the projects I worked on was a demo bot that we could take to local elementary schools to show them what FIRST Robotics was all about. It had an interesting drivetrain using mecanum wheels which allowed it to move in any direction. I wrote a program that showed which direction each wheel was spinning on an addressable LED strip that was mounted on the side of the robot.
