Welcome to the 2022 Mechanical Advantage #openalliance thread! We’re very excited to be continuing this year after the great feedback on our 2020-2021 thread. We hope this can be a great resource for the community and are always looking for ideas on what information would be most useful to you.

Team 6328, Mechanical Advantage, from Littleton, MA is made up of 37 students and 12 mentors. This will be the team’s 6th season competing. Currently, team 6328 plans to compete week 1 at Granite State, week 4 at Greater Boston, and week 6 at Hartford. The team goal with this schedule is to have a simple robot functional as early as possible and then iterate throughout the season.

What is new with us?

This year, like many of you I’m sure, our team has lots of students who haven’t gone through a normal build season yet. We expect many bumps along the way as we all get back into the swing of things in this ever changing environment.

The team has also been investing in more in-house manufacturing capabilities since the 2020 season, with the hopes of getting students more involved in the full manufacturing lifecycle. This also means a shift away from the sheet metal construction of 2020 and moving to a primarily tube and gusset design style. We have also swapped over to 100% using Onshape for CAD this season.

Schedule

Currently, we plan on meeting Mondays through Thursdays and Saturdays. We expect this to change as we run into various constraints related to resources and COVID concerns. Subteams are also encouraged to meet remotely when the work allows to limit the number of people in the shop at any given time.

Open Alliance

If you followed along with us in 2020 and 2021, updates should be very similar this year. We will be posting smaller, more informal, updates as the week progresses with a larger weekly recap each Sunday. All of our sub teams will be contributing to share what they’re working on.