151 Business Weekly Digest

It’s Go Time!

With the challenge announced, the Tough Techs swiftly start brainstorming robot designs. Meanwhile the business subteam swiftly starts working on ways to raise more funds for competitions and the robot.

First year software student Ryan Paterson and first year mechanical student Claudio Agullion working together on designs

by Nathan Delehanty

Business Updates

With the Tough Techs attending an event 2 hours away from our workspace (the NE District URI Event), the business sub-team has started to work on raising funds to offset hotel costs in order to make the event accessible for all students who would like to attend. Mentor Jeffa Lombardi and CEO Nathan Delehanty have been collaborating in order to start a restaurant fundraiser. In order to do this, they polled the students on the team in order to determine restaurant popularity. The results of this poll can be seen in the image below. With these results, they have started to brainstorm the most strategic time and place for the fundraiser before they reach out.

The business sub-team have also been looking for other ways to bring in funds, including our GoFundMe. This GoFundMe has carried over from last year, in which we are currently 89% toward our goal. Some other ideas that we have brainstormed have been a spaghetti dinner, along with past fundraisers such as a car wash fundraiser and cabaret. 

In addition, Jeffa and Nathan, while working with Maverick’s Stitch and Screen in Amherst, NH, have been working to set up a webstore to sell team merch. The team is working to refine the merch designs with the company on items like hoodies, soft shell jackets, backpacks, sweatpants, and more. 

In addition, Maitreyee Biwalkar, our COO and social media manager, has been posting our raffle calendar winners along with our senior posts. These posts can be found on our Instagram and Facebook @toughtechs151. 

Technical Updates

With the start of our build season, REEFSCAPE has been officially announced. The first week, we wrapped up our discussions about the contents of the manual, possible game strategies, our team goals, while also getting our field elements set up for robot testing. We have now officially moved on to finalizing a design this week and sending our BOM (Build of Materials) to the business subteam to get ordered. With our initial design being unattainable, our design lead Keegan Lee led the process of refining our design to accommodate what parts were available to us due to parts on backorder. Starting next week, we are able to start the build process whilst we also wait for parts to come in. We will also start the fabrication of parts through our mentor Jamie Healey’s machine shop at the school he works at.

Now shifting our gears toward the electrical subteam, led by student Makena Columb and lead electrical mentor Alyssa Delehanty, who have been working on team sustainability and growth. Through educational google classroom materials as well as creating and improving electrical and pneumatic testing rigs, they have been hard at work before they are faced with the task of this year’s chassis.

In addition, software has been hard at work towards getting our swerve chassis fine tuned. This year is our first year using swerve drive, so there is lots of work to be done. Through testing code on our test swerve chassis we built during the preseason, we have been steadily improving its functionality. April tags is one of software’s next tasks among the long list in order to make our swerve drive stronger. Our software leads Tejas Shettigar, Aaryan Gadwal, and Lucas Callahan have been working closely with our software mentor lead, Jay Tarbotton, in order to create a task list of what needs to be done and how these tasks will be delegated.

Special Announcements

Congratulations to our Dean’s List Nominees Lucas Callahan and Aarna Puvvala as well as our Woodie Flowers nominee Rick Neckorcuk.

Tough Techs Business Sub-Team