Add minutes for 2024-10-29

2024/2024-10-29.md

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+# Kit Team Meeting 2024-10-29
+
+## Attendees
+
+### Present
+
+- Karina Kwiatek
+- Jake Howard
+- Will Barber
+- Keith Emerson
+- Alex Colville
+
+### Apologies
+
+## Topics
+
+### Competitor resources
+
+- Without movement, it can be hard to motivate competitors
+
+#### Resources for mentors
+
+- Unclear what it should involve
+- Getting to a moving robot
+    - Building a chassis
+        - Where to purchase things
+        - Parts choices
+            - Omniwheels
+            - Stepper motors vs encoders
+    - Making a robot which moves
+    - Turning
+- Don't want to be too prescriptive on the right process
+
+#### Sensors
+
+- Which sensors are useful?
+- We see lots of vision-only
+- Lots of teams try and build their own vision system
+    - Not especially well - computer vision is difficult
+- Don't consider the boards in isolation
+    - Think of your robot as a whole
+
+### Mentoring
+
+- The earlier we can allocate mentors, the better
+- Karina to explicitly reach out to mentors to confirm which teams they should reach out to
+
+### Outputs
+
+- Tutorials
+    - How to do encoders
+        - Building switches
+        - Detecting clicks
+        - Uses multiple boards
+        - Building your own encoder or buying one
+    - Motors
+        - Mention direction indicator LEDs
+        - Don't drive full speed
+    - Vision
+        - What does the data mean / how to use it
+        - Turning to face a marker
+            - Which face is the right one to lock on to
+            - Different faces are driven to in different ways
+        - Motion blur
+    - Localization
+        - Benefits of absolute positioning
+    - Servos
+        - Contrast to motors
+        - Torque
+    - Debugging your code
+        - The "ok" LED
+        - Using the user LEDs to represent state
+        - Useful logging
+        - Web interface
+            - Viewing camera pictures
+- Basics of control theory
+    - Closed / open loop control
+- Move tutorials and Robot 101 to top of navbar
+- Update web interface page (perhaps move somewhere else?)
+    - Update images
+    - Mention viewing camera output
+- Where to buy parts
+    - Not a complete list!
+    - Shopping list
+    - What makes a good motor / servo etc
+        - Motors with mounts
+    - Wheel compatibility
+        - Grip
+    - Tools
+- Chassis materials
+    - Mechano
+    - Wood
+    - Aluminium extrusion
+    - Laser-cut wood
+    - Acrylic (probably just cosmetics only)
+    - 3D printers
+- How to mount
+    - Copy from intro
+    - Mounting components to all of them
+    - Attaching pieces of the robot together
+        - Nuts / bolts
+        - Cable ties
+        - Maintainability
+    - Weak motor mounts affects movement
+- How to drive
+    - How to turn
+    - Front-wheel drive
+    - Why rear-wheel drive is a bad idea
+    - Omniwheels
+    - Tracks
+    - Ball casters vs caster wheels
+    - Not a car - can control each wheel independently
+- Interracting with the arena
+    - Precision grabber
+        - Complicated
+        - Precise
+        - Is it necessary
+    - Scoops
+        - Robot consumes objects instead of scooping them up
+        - Easy to assemble and use
+        - Hard to do precise movement
+            - Can lift
+        - Easier to repair at the competition
+    - Vacuum pump
+        - On an arm?
+    - Pushing
+        - No additional mechanisms
+    - Nothing is ever precise
+        - Tolerances
+        - Compound tolerances
+        - Things can move
+        - Tokens aren't perfect cubes
+        - The floor is not flat
+        - Wheels slip
+- Collaborative editing
+    - Don't just have it on the USB stick
+    - Well-documented code
+    - Don't use the internals of our API
+- `git` as a narrative
+    - Using GitHub
+    - Parallel features
+    - Don't touch the command line
+    - VSCode docs for using `git`
+- Walkthrough editor setup
+    - Why you want a proper editor
+        - Intellisense
+        - Syntax highlighting
+    - VSCode
+    - Jetbrains
+    - GitHub.dev
+- Project management
+    - Suggested milestones
+        - Early design phase
+            - Basic robot design
+            - Mechanisms
+            - Strategy
+            - Finalise it after a certain point
+        - Basic movement
+        - Come up with their own milestones
+            - Still need milestones
+    - Don't break things right at the end
+    - Make a plan
+        - Right balance of "plan" and "try"
+        - Perfection is the enemy of good
+    - When are you going to do challenges
+    - Virtual competition
+        - Coders tackling both
+        - Separate coders?
+    - Team captain?
+    - Main areas
+        - Programming
+        - Mechanical
+        - Electronics
+    - People have focused areas
+    - Single stream of work
+        - Single goal
+        - single design
+        - Single vision
+        - Silos are bad
+    - What help is available?
+        - What help do you want from who?
+- What is a mentor
+    - How to make use of them
+    - Remote or in-person?
+    - How to get one?
+    - It's not all technical
+        - Project management
+    - Accountability
+
+### Actions
+
+- Jake to open issues for the above ideas
+
+### Other
+
+- [Issues in minutes repo (action points from previous meetings)](https://github.com/srobo/kit-team-minutes/issues)
+    - ACTION Sort this out
+- [SR(A)WN](https://github.com/srobo/srawn/issues)
+- After meeting doing
+- AOB?
+
+- Thank Yous and Well Dones
+