Anna's blog

Forty-five days (unless I can't count), then I'll be a college student in a distant faraway mysteriously strange land of The East Coast. My days as a member of The Green Machine shall be officially over (well, they have been for a while, but... now it's more official). But don't cry! I'll come back and visit! I might even make a surprise blog post if I feel so inclined! Exciting, yes?

So yeah, I guess this is my last blog post as a pre-college student (unless something Really Awesome happens and I just have to babble about it). So... time to get sappy and melodramatic! And I'm not even dramatic by nature (unless it involves figure skating, but I'll stop there), so this is kind of a big deal for me. I hope you're all impressed.

Wait, it's Tuesday? What happened to the weekend?

Posted by Anna on April 20, 2010

I kind of forgot to blog about Saturday. Oopsies.

Um, wow. That was my last FIRST competition ever. I'll either have to visit next year or fail all my classes and stay in high school an extra year so I can be on the Green Machine again.

The Segway may play for days in Uruguay. Eh?

Posted by Anna on April 17, 2010

Today was intense. What did you expect?

The day started out with a few nice speeches by various FIRST people (actually my day started out with me falling out of bed, but that's a different story). Woodie Flowers and Dean Kamen both talked the usual about FIRST's progress and science and technology, which wasn't anything new but nice to hear anyway. We also got a friendly letter from President Obama, and around noon the secretary of education stopped by to visit and talk to us, which was kind of a big deal and quite exciting.

Ow my feet

Posted by Anna on April 16, 2010

Well the first day of the 2010 Championships are officially over, and what a day it was!

This Thursday was a bit different from other Thursdays of typical competitions, because it wasn't dedicated solely to practice matches. Instead we only had practice matches until lunchtime, and then after the lunch break we started the seeding matches. I guess this is to make up for the huge increase in the amount of teams at the competition this year, and if we tried to pack all the seeding matches into Friday and Saturday morning they wouldn't fit.

Glow sticks, broken stuff, trophies, oh my!

Posted by Anna on April 3, 2010

Today was interesting to say the least. We got our toughbox fixed quickly enough, and there didn't seem to be any problems... And then the robot stopped working on the field. Wut. It took us several hours to figure out what was going wrong (the combination of a broken e-stop button, a defective gamepad, a bad usb hub, and a classmate battery fail). So in our second seeding match this morning our robot just decided not to move at all, which caused a bit of a panic. Fortunately we got that fixed by the final match, in which we were quite epic and managed to help assist much of the scoring that happened in the match, as well as score a few points directly ourselves.

I can't think of a title. Competitions are too brain-eating.

Posted by Anna on April 2, 2010

One more day left of the MN regionals! Aaaack.

Actually we were doing relatively well today in our later matches; we scored quite a few times and autonomous mostly works (those chains on the goals are really frustrating though). The big problem right now is that the plexiglass on one of our toughboxes pretty much completely shattered so we'll have to remount a new one tomorrow which we'll have to take from the practice mecanum bot in the workshop tomorrow. So that'll be slightly hectic, but necessary if we want a robot that can do more that sit and look pretty on the field. But other than that bit the robot was cooperating. We had some problems earlier on because of various technical mishaps, including a jaguar going weird on us, the analog jumper falling out, etc etc, but now everything (except the toughbox) is pretty much secured and ready for the matches tomorrow.

The robot exploded. JKAPRILFOOLSLOLOL. Yeah no...

Posted by Anna on April 1, 2010

Day one of the Minnesota North Star Regional is now over, and the Green Machine is in pretty good shape!

We started out a little confused by the fact that our pit, unlike all the others, was not the typical 10x10 (or is it 8x8? I can never remember...) foot pit. Rather, because of spacing issues, we got lucky and got stuck with a 5x20 pit, so it's super long and skinny. It was a very odd adjustment, but of course we managed. The banners were a bit confusing since they're designed for a normal sized pit so now they don't fit right, but thankfully we're good at improvising.

Iiiiiiin the jungle, the miiiighty jungle, the Zazu sleeps toniiiiight.

Posted by Anna on March 14, 2010

Yawwwwn. Good morning.

Naturally everyone is tired after the events of yesterday. Despite the fact that we didn't make the elimination rounds, we still managed to make good progress with Zazu, and now we're much more prepared for the Minnesota regional in two weeks! There's still a few technical issues we need to work out, but other than that with strategy and everything we are now quite ready for the next competition.

Team 1816 needs a DeLorean and some plutonium. And a flux capacitor.

Posted by Anna on March 12, 2010

Day 2, seven matches, and we are currently seeded 16th. That's pretty good considering that our robot spent one match sitting motionless, our roller never really seems to want to work, and we accidentally tipped a robot over (though that wasn't completely our fault... We still feel bad about it though. But it didn't break, so that's ok).

Despite the fact that Zazu isn't exactly a good shooter, we've actually become pretty useful in matches by playing strong strategic defense by driving around and getting in opposing robot's ways. So actually we're pretty helpful, but we're definitely going to have to advertise ourselves a bunch tomorrow so a team in the top 8 will pick us.

Team 1816 needs a spare warp coil

Posted by Anna on March 11, 2010

Well unfortunately we never actually got the robot working on the field, though for us I guess that's pretty typical. Most of the day was spent being uber busy making fixes to the kicker, adding a shield so soccer balls wouldn't crash into the electronics, and a few other things.

We actually did get the robot on the field once (because we were required to so that we could make sure we were connecting all right, which we were), but Zazu didn't seem too inclined to do anything useful. After a few more mechanical changes all the people who hadn't gone to dinner stayed to make fixes on the practice field.

Login/Register