Blog

Blog

Brain Filling With Code

Posted by alexo on January 30, 2012

Since January 7, we have been hard at work on our robot. There’s great progress and breakthroughs, but then we hit semester finals. Despite the lost work-time, we are determined to stay on schedule and actually have a robot ready to be programmed by Scrimmage Day. The Builders finished the robot's chassis, and started working on a final shooter design as well as a ball-collecting device. They tell us programmers that the robot will be finished a week ahead of schedule. That means us programmers are moving from making significant progress in all three robot languages to working on basic autonomous code – in all three languages. Programmers are focused on interfacing with different sensors, as well as ironing out any bugs or issues they find.

SPARK Day

Posted by alexo on January 22, 2012

I had no idea time really could fly as fast as it is during this year’s build. As quickly as it arrived, Week Two of the build season is now in the books and Week Three is upon us. It’s a short week as most of us have semester finals. But, we have made significant progress towards building our new robot, Zephyr. The Build Team made a prototype of a shooting mechanism for launching the balls, and mounted it on our mecanum robot. They also worked on a ball collecting mechanism, which acts similar to a street-sweeper. The CAD Team helped with dimensions and the designs of the components the Build Team created.

Week Two Already!?

Posted by alexo on January 16, 2012

It seems like only yesterday that we received the new game from FIRST! In just a week, our team has made some major headway in the design of our 2012 robot. The Builders have been hard at work prototyping our designs, bringing them from paper to the computer screen to the real world. We have crafted many of our ideas out of wood and old parts to see how they work, and now we are moving towards making them out of metal and bits and pieces from the new Kit of Parts. With all of this designing and prototyping going on, you can imagine how busy we’re keeping our CAD subteam. Typically, they work in a classroom in the middle school next door, but with the magic of laptops, they’ve moved into a tiny office next to the workshop.

The 2012 FIRST Season "Rebounds" Into Action!

Posted by alexo on January 9, 2012

Wow! What a crazy last few days we have had! From starting off early in the morning on
Saturday Jan. 7 with the NASA-webcast of FIRST announcing the 2012 Game, Rebound
Rumble, to the two days of brainstorming and problem-solving that followed, the build

A New Year filled with FIRST

Posted by alexo on January 2, 2012

With a new year comes a new FRC Competition and a new Game! I'm itching to find out what it is! Kickoff is so close, I can almost taste it! Every year, teams head to the Coffman Union at the University of Minnesota, as well as other designated locations around the state of Minnesota, to view the live stream of FIRST announcing “the” game. In 2011, I went to Kickoff at Coffman Union with only a few other members of Team 1816, but this year, we’re helping to register and direct traffic for the 90 FRC teams that will pack the Main Hall, the upstairs theater auditorium, as well as the STSS building across the street from the union.

SPLASH!

Posted by alexo on December 19, 2011

And so, like all good things, our pre-season must draw to a close. Minnesota SPLASH is approaching its final webinars courtesy of Microsoft, marking this year as a step forward in the way SPLASH reaches out to the rest of the FIRST Community here in Minnesota. We had a great time at the first two presentations, meeting with mentors and members from different FRC teams. So far, there have been six presentations given, from Team 2169-King Tec’s introduction and overview of what a typical build season is really like, to a step-by-step lecture on good wiring techniques and pneumatics by Team 2177-The Robettes. This year’s SPLASH presentations are mostly geared towards rookie and second-year teams, and offer many great tips.

We Thank Our Sponsors

Posted by alexo on December 12, 2011

As the FIRST deadline for reporting sponsorships approaches, we continue to work hard to contact and meet with as many returning and new corporate sponsors as possible given the time constraints. Corporate funding of FIRST teams is extremely important for several reasons. The FIRST Robotics program demands that teams reach out to the business community as the primary source of funding. The funding is used for competition registration fees and building a robot, but also to fund outreach efforts into our communities. It’s not just companies with an engineering bent that we approach. We find that increasingly we are successfully reaching out to new corporate sponsors that don’t seem to have a direct connection to STEM (science, technology engineering and math).

SubTeams and Safety!

Posted by alexo on December 5, 2011

Two major events for our team, both of which mean that we’re getting ever closer to Kickoff and the six week build.

Work, work, work!

Posted by alexo on November 28, 2011

The pre-season is quickly winding down. And yet there is still so much to do! We still have another wave of Beta Testing, more parts to model in CAD, sponsorships to track down (thank you to our sponsors for renewing their commitments to us!), robots needing maintenance, team biographies to write, scouting software to tweak, animation to be animated, a Safety Powerpoint about safety at home, in the workshop, while at competitions to be presented, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg! It’s beginning to seem a lot like the regular season! But before we launch into the “official 2012 season,” we need to focus on Minnesota SPLASH.

Every Holiday Should Begin with a Regional

Posted by alexo on November 21, 2011

Attending the 2nd annual Minne-Mini Regional in Prior Lake was a blast! A full-day of regional style competition is just what the whole team needed to get excited for the season to start. Co-hosting this event with Team 2220-Blue Twilight and Team-2169 KING TeC put the spotlight on coopertition at its very best. Each team took on a major part of putting this event together and together, we got the job done. Best of all, we had an opportunity to teach rookies how to scout other teams and we "Beta-Tested" our new scouting program. Overall, everyone had a great time, the competitions were fun, and it was a fitting farewell to LOGOmotion. Zeebo, our 2011 competition robot, may now enjoy its new life as a demonstration robot!