Author Archives: Edward

Vex Worlds

“Interlake High School ninth graders Dennis Liao (foreground) and Eric Sun (directly behind him) and 12th grader Edward Jiang (behind Eric) watch as their robot, The Omnibot, goes through its moves, lifting blocks and dropping them at different goals spots. The three Bellevue students are part of the only team from the state selected to go to an international robotics competition Wednesday in Dallas. The team of about 34 studetns built tabletop-size robots designed to pick up blocks. All five of the team’s robots qualified for the international competition, which will feature 280 robots from 12 countries”

The Vex team has appeared in the Monday issue of the Seattle Times! If you have a copy, please save it – the picture is on the back of the “NW News” section.

Tomorrow, the Vex team will leave for the Vex Worlds tournament in Dallas, TX! The competition will be from Thursday-Saturday.

If you’d like to watch the Vex competition from Seattle, you can view it on NASA’s website: http://robotics.nasa.gov/

Vex Schedule + Worlds

As the Vex team nears worlds, the meeting schedule is ramping up! If you’re not part of Vex, you’re still welcome to join us in our meetings at Lexis Nexis (2445 140th Ave NE, Suite B200, Bellevue, WA 98005).

Also, Mr. Cooney got back with the field trip status. Basically, this trip will have similar status to any other out of school activity. As a result, you’ll need to get a note from your parents and get the attendance office to give you a prearranged absense form. Do this soon!

Wednesday 4:30-6:30: Programming Autonomous and Driver Practice (optional)

Thursday 4:30-9: Driver Practice

Saturday 10-6: Scrimage

Sunday 12-5: Scrimage

Monday 5-8:30: Scrimage, and Team Meeting (to discuss the trip details) MANDATORY Parent meeting at 7-8

Tuesday 5-7: Final Packing Session, additional trip details.

Wednesday: DALLAS BABY!

Wednesday Meeting Recap

For everyone who didn’t get to attend the last bit of the Wednesday meeting, we discussed the spring sports assembly on Friday. We’ll be preparing a skit for the assembly.

Here’s the current plan for the skit. In the skit, we’ll be “revealing” what people didn’t know about Robotics – that we built robotic teachers. We’re then going to have a few teachers wrapped in aluminum foil pretend to be robots, with “drivers” carrying the Vex remote controls. The teachers line up for a game – autonomous mode starts. The teachers can do whatever they like during the “autonomous mode”. After autonomous mode, drivers step forwards and pretend to control the teachers during the match, telling them to pick up space rocks, throw them at the other alliance, etc. We’ll have a few people dressed up as a crowd, cheering. They could hold the 1899 sign, wave around the flag, etc. During the match, the blue alliance robot “breaks down”. We’ll have people come with huge wrenches/etc pretend to fix our “robot”. We’ll then send the robot to another match, where blue alliance wins. The end.

Things to consider:

  • Not everyone in Robotics will be up on stage. We’ll need some of us to cheer from the crowds – to get them fired up.
  • Wear your Saints Robotics T-Shirt!
  • Assembly rehearsal is tomorrow after school.
  • Assembly is Friday after 7th period.

Washington Vex Competition 09

1899 Vex Team Picture

1899 Vex Team Picture

Congrats to the Vex team for their amazing accomplishments yesterday at the 2009 Washington Vex Competition! We finished the preliminaries with a 4-2 win record, ending in 5th place. We also managed to achieve 3rd place in the driver challenge with a score of 48.

During the finalist rounds, Team 420 “Mousebot”, 3rd place, picked us as an alliance partner. We accepted along with Team 690. Unfortunately, in our first match, Mousebot had some technical difficulties and was disabled during the round, so we lost. Mousebot fixed their technical problems, but 690 was subbed in for round two. Unfortunately, they lost and our alliance was eliminated.

However, we did surprisingly well for a first-year Vex team with only two weeks to build a robot. I’d like to point out some of the things we did really well. First, we had presets for our arm. That means that our drivers didn’t have to waste time getting the arm height correct for each goal – the robot assisted the driver to score. This is a good use of automation to help perform tasks and resulted in less time to score. Also, we had a few hours of driver practice at Exothermic’s field, which gave us an edge over some teams which did less driving.

Also, we got lots of good scouting practice. Over the course of 6 hours or so, we managed to obtain over 1700 words of scouting data! We used a good system and will definitely do that during FRC.

Vex team, Dennis will be leading the disassembly of Ctrl-C. We’ll most likely keep the base so that it will become a towing bot for our trailer.

Friday Vex Meeting

4-7 at LexisNexis – Vex meeting – we’ll be driving, coding, and nothing else. Mandatory for drivers, optional for everyone else. See you there!

Vex Competition

Your hard work has paid off! On Saturday, March 14th, we’ll be going to Redmond High School (17272 NE 104th St, Redmond, WA) to compete in the Seattle Regional for Vex.

If you’re not in our Vex team, I still highly encourage you to come and watch! The most exciting time of the day will be around 2:30-5 if you can only make a few hours.

Vex team, to show our appreciation to Exothermic Robotics, we’ll be staying to help with setup and cleanup. Please try to make this if possible. You can use these hours for volunteer hours if you need it for anything.

Breakfast & Lunch:

Redmond High will be selling breakfast and lunch (and giving it for free to volunteers). Bring your own lunch or bring money!

Schedule

7:00 – 8:30: Setup

8:30-5:30: Competition

5:30-7:00: Clean-up

Menu

Oatmeal $1 for a cup
Donuts $1
Bagels & cream cheese $1
Coffee $1
Muffins $2
Tea $1

Lunch:
Pizza $3 slice/2 for $5 ($14 for whole pizza) cheese or pepperoni
Water $1 bottle
Soft Drinks $1 can
Jamba Juice Smoothies $2/$4
Cup of noodles $1

Vex Schedule

Thanks for everyone who has shown up for the Wednesday meeting today. Vex is doing well. The rest of our meetings (besides the Wednesday meeting) will be held with the Exothermic Robotics at LexisNexis, 2445 140th Ave NE, Suite B200, Bellevue, WA 98005. Here’s our schedule:

  • Saturday: 10-6
  • Sunday: 12-6
  • Tuesday: 4-7
  • Wednesday: 5-9
  • Thursday: 4-9

I can help provide rides after school. You do not have to be present at all of these meetings, but the more the merrier. Over the weekend, we will make our arm perfected, modify the robot so that there can be two drivers, polish up some rough areas, and get some programming done for the sensors. Over the weekdays, we will do some extensive driving to get experience, strategizing, and make design modifications as necessary. It should be fairly relaxing.

This will culminate in our competition at Redmond High on Saturday, March 14th. I’ll post more info about that soon. Thanks for the great work, team!

Vex/Exothermic Meeting Tomorrow

We will have a meeting with Redmond High tomorrow at LexisNexis from 4-7. I’ll be in the room next to Mr. Cooney’s room around 3:45 if anyone needs a ride.

We’ll work on perfecting the arm and drivetrain. We’ll also test drive.

Vex + Exothermics Meeting

Thanks to everyone who attended the Exothermic meeting today! I hope it was a rewarding experience – I definitely learned a lot. I’d like to give a thanks to Exothermic Robotics for inspiring and helping us greatly today. We recieved two giant boxes of parts thanks to the help of Rick and John. Thanks to Preetum for giving us a great overview of 575′s awesome bot and its programming.

Anyways, lets discuss plans again. Tomorrow, I’m not exactly sure how much we will be able to accomplish. But we will meet during tutorial.

Sunday, we will be building a design inspired by Team 525′s bot. Meet at Dennis’s house from 8-5.

After the sunday meeting, we’ll plan how we want to do weekday meetings. Exothermic Robotics has mentioned that we could do build at their place from 4-7 on Tuesday/Thursdays – which could be great because we can get their expertise and practice in their field. If everyone’s interested, we could do that + Wednesday meetings.

Homework: Finish reading the Vex Inventor’s guide by Sunday. Chapter 1 Introduction – Chapter 2 Structure – Chapter 3 Motion – Chapter 4 Power – Chapter 5 Sensors – Chapter 6 Control – Chapter 7 Logic